The California Digital Library has digitized millions of books for the University of California (UC) libraries, but very few people in the UC community understand the process of how books make it from the shelf to the screen and the implications of those digitization efforts. San José State University School of Information student Amy Rogers spent her summer internship working to change that.

Rogers interned at the California Digital Library’s Mass Digitization division working on a video called “The Story of the Digital Book”. The 10-minute video explains the process of digitization, the possibilities created by digitization, and long-term preservation strategies. Rogers developed the storyboard while working with a staff project specialist who shot and edited the video.

Rogers, a web information specialist who has been working on the Internet since before the Mosaic browser made the Web more user friendly in the 1990s, became interested in digitization because “it helps make information accessible,” she said.

“I still love working with the web, and now that I am interested in the library profession and increasing access to digital information, it naturally follows that I want to work with digital libraries,” she said.

Rogers decided to earn her MLIS when she realized how much she enjoyed working with librarians and “the most interesting library-related jobs require a MLIS.” While at iSchool Rogers has also interned at the San Francisco Exploratorium and Innovative Interfaces, and this semester is interning at the Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley. Long term, Rogers hopes to work with digital libraries and digital asset management systems.

She landed the California Digital Library internship through iSchool alumna Joan Starr, who is a strategic and project planning manager at the organization. Starr and Rogers were following each other on Twitter, and one day Starr asked her if she would be interested in an internship. “Of course I said yes,” Rogers said.

Rogers, who earned her undergraduate degree in economics from Mills College in Oakland, also volunteers weekly at her local library and is the webmaster and editor at the Bay Area Library and Information Network.