The Digital Services Department is happy to announce our first completely 'virtual' intern — Cynthia Mari Orozco, who will be working with us as our Latino Publications Intern this August. Her internship, as well as the project she will be working on, is funded by the Smithsonian Latino Center through their Latino Initiatives Pool Fund.

While with the Libraries Cynthia will be aiding in the creation of a Smithsonian Spanish language e-book collection by selecting and evaluating Spanish language titles from the Smithsonian collections for digitization and conversion to ePub format. She will also be reviewing other (non-Smithsonian) digitized collections for complementary and relevant titles to convert to ePubs. She will prioritize titles for digitization and conversion, focusing on public domain (out of copyright) titles in Spanish, as well as public domain titles in other languages related to Latino Studies.

 
Cynthia will graduate this summer with her MLIS from San José State University while living in Costa Mesa, California. While Cynthia has completed all of her MLIS coursework in an online format, this will be her first experience as a remote intern.

With an MA in Latin American Studies from San Diego State University, Cynthia is excited to bring her background in Spanish language and Latin American and Latino Studies to this project. As an undergraduate in political science and sociology at the University of California, Irvine, Cynthia became interested in Latin American politics and history. In her senior year, she traveled to Northern Chile to participate in an archaeological field school through UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Her experience in Chile encouraged her to continue pursuing studies in Latin America. As a graduate student at SDSU, she continued to travel and live in various parts of Latin America, including Brazil, Nicaragua, Argentina, Cuba, and Colombia. While at SDSU, Cynthia became inspired to pursue a career in librarianship after receiving invaluable support from her university library.

 Cynthia will be posting an update on the project next month, so stay tuned!

—Keri Thompson