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About the site | Blogs | The author | Contact & networks | Publications, platforms, and academic networks | Libraries & archives | Musics & sounds | Teaching activities - Libraries & archives | Consultancy - Libraries & archives | Copyright | Disclaimer | History
This website, inaugurated on August 2022, compiles a series of contents, professional and of another type, that I have been producing since 2000 and that I have presented online through a good number of platforms and spaces, especially blogs, digital magazines and columns, as well as social networks. At the same time, it serves as a platform for present and future publications within my areas of interest.
In the publications section, I give an account of platforms, archives and other storage spaces for my intellectual production, while in my blogs I continue to write periodically.
All contents related to music and (ethno)musicology have been moved to the website Instrumentarium (mostly in Spanish).
The site hosts a blog in Spanish on libraries and archives. There is also a space in English, hosted on Medium: Libraries in the margins.
I am a native of Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires (Argentina, 1973). I became a librarian in 1999 and, in 2004, a graduate in Library Science and Documentation from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). There I also studied Biology and History (Anthropology and Archeology branch), although much earlier I had studied Marine Sciences at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). After a long and diverse professional career, since 2020 I live in Bogotá (Colombia), where I spend most of my time, and from where I work as a consultant on a wide variety of knowledge and memory management and content production projects.
Professor, researcher, lecturer and popular writer, I work with natural sciences, traditional knowledge, memory, identity, sounds and silences, musical instruments, audiovisual collections and information management, and with the dialogue between libraries, archives and museums to build new knowledge and recover old stories.
Throughout my career I have gained extensive experience in social librarianship; in working with libraries on the margins; in the management of traditional knowledge, oral tradition and threatened sounds (languages and music); and in the design of library services for indigenous societies and other "subaltern" groups. I have specialized in knowledge classification and the construction of documentary languages, vocabularies, ontologies and metadata. And to all that I add my work with library design and library services, collection management, decolonization, development of "base" libraries (rural, public, community, school, popular ones) and mobile libraries, open access, copyright / copyleft, open source in library science (DSpace, Koha, OJS3), non-European book history, reading promotion, digital humanities, and qualitative research.
I understand and defend library as a committed space, of socio-political activism and militancy, and of cultural, identity and collective resistance.
My work in the Galapagos Islands (2018-2023) linked me to history and memory of science, open science, e-research, conservation of biodiversity and the environment, citizen science, biomimicry, sustainability and degrowth, as well as with knowledge mobilization, environmental communication, dissemination and education, and preservation, conservation and digitization of heritage collections.
Since 2004 I have been part of several sections and groups of IFLA, I have worked with the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) Consortium, I participate in various editorial committees and digital research and debate spaces, I teach and lecture, and I write informative texts on the topics of my interest, which I publish through my independent publishing house El Zorro de Abajo Editora (previously, Wayrachaki Editora).
In addition to being a librarian, I'm a musician: a multi-instrumentalist acceptable in everything and virtuoso in nothing, performer of traditional Latin American and European music. I am interested in the sounds and silences of the world, and the many stories they tell, and I feel a special inclination towards the relationship of that sound heritage with memory and identity. I investigate and share the results through a wide range of digital publications, compose and perform music, build instruments, explore other sound horizons, and create new personal research projects online.
Beyond libraries and music, I'm a professional proofreader, translator and editorial designer, as well as an old print worker, an avid language learner, a frustrated fiction writer, a blogger with 20 years of experience behind me, a Wikipedian and an Esperantist, a citizen scientist apprentice, a photographer, and a puppet maker.
My contact email is edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com. I may also be found at several social networks, whose direct accesses are presented in the bar at the bottom of this page (mostly in Spanish).
Publications, platforms, & academic networks
All my publications, including digital books, articles, conferences, courses, pre-prints, compilations of blog posts and informative texts, are stored in the Argentinean open-access repository Acta Académica, as well as in the folder "Publicaciones" of my space in GoogleDrive.
A handful of those texts are also in the open access archive DLIST, of the University of Arizona (USA). And although in the past all my materials were presented on E-LIS, they were removed from there around 2016 due to strong differences with the structure and management model of that space.
Among my publications, there are digital books on indigenous libraries (link in Spanish); digital books on music and musical instruments in Spanish and in English; articles on music and musical instruments (link in Spanish); photography books (link in Spanish); and a series of fiction works (link in Spanish).
From 2007 to 2022, a good part of my digital books were published through my old independent publishing house Wayrachaki Editora (link in Spanish), a personal initiative which today is continued by El Zorro de Abajo Editora (link in Spanish).
Most of my intellectual production is also stored on three platforms that are popular but somewhat debated due to their working model: Issuu, Scribd and Calaméo.
I also belong to a number of academic networks. In three of them I present and share, as in those mentioned above, most of my publications: Google Scholar, Research Gate and Academia.edu. These have also been strongly debated for their ethical principles and action models; however, they present a series of utilities that are beneficial.
Finally, I participate in other academic-professional structures, such as Web of Science, Scopus, Mendeley and Zotero.
I have been working with libraries, archives and documentation centers since 1998, performing all possible tasks within those structures of memory and knowledge management. I have specialized in the development of library services for indigenous peoples, oral tradition management, libraries "in the margins", libraries and degrowth, knowledge classification, cultural heritage, and libraries and biodiversity conservation, among many other topics.
My lines of work on this area can be consulted, in Spanish, in the section devoted to libraries and archives at this website. My actitivies as a consultant and a professor are listed below.
In the field of music, I have produced a good number of open access publications (digital books and articles), oriented towards dissemination. In addition, I carry out extensive research and outreach work, I have produced some recordings (CDs, etc.), I build musical instruments, and I carry out educational and outreach activities (concerts, conferences, courses, etc.), all of them related, in general, with the traditional music of Latin America.
All contents related to music and (ethno)musicology are presented on my website Instrumentarium.
Teaching activities | Libraries & archives
I develop my LIS-related teaching work (presential and virtual instances) around most of the topics that make up conventional Library & Information Sciences (i.e., those taught in a standard university curriculum). I add the most social facets of the profession (critical and "trench" libraries, libraries "in the margins"), memory-related activities (oral tradition, traditional knowledge), areas of contact between libraries / information and biological and environmental sciences, and the world of data management.
Among the potential activities to be developed (courses, workshops and / or seminars) I offer the "Librarianship for non-librarians" series (with a wide selection of contents, from acquisition to cataloging and classification, through policy design and reading promotion), the "Trench libraries" series (for unconventional libraries or those working in complex spaces), the "Decolonizing libraries" series (addressing library work from the Epistemologías del Sur / Southern Epistemologies' perspective), the "Libraries and biosphere" series (addressing citizen science, sustainability, growth, "green" libraries, Agenda 2030) and the "Libraries from scratch" series (for those starting a library). I also work with ontologies and thesaurus building, knowledge classification, data management and semantic web.
Finally, I teach courses, workshops and / or seminars on collection and management of oral tradition and threatened sounds (languages and music, especially indigenous) and the organization of library services for indigenous societies and "minority" populations.
For further details, please contact me.
Consultancy | Libraries & archives
I provide professional consulting services on topics related to the organization of bibliographic and informative collections (physical and virtual), document analysis and classification of knowledge, linked data, semantic web, data resource management, digital curation, data visualization, building of ontologies, vocabularies and thesauri (especially those related to pure and natural sciences, anthropology and history), planning of information services and design of virtual libraries (both for scientific-academic and business environments), data management, urban memory, development of mobile library services (especially for rural environments and users), cultural heritage management (especially indigenous and rural), management of sound collections (threatened languages, traditional music) and oral expressions, and organization of bioinformation and biological collections.
For further details, please contact me.
The textual contents published on this site, including posts, digital books, articles, lectures, etc., are my intellectual property, unless otherwise indicated, and are distributed using a Creative Commons license Attribution-No commercial-No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) 4.0 International. This means that the material can be copied and redistributed in any medium or format, as long as the authorship is properly acknowledged, it is not used for a commercial purpose, and the derivative work is not disseminated.
The contents directly and unequivocally linked to certain peoples and cultures at a local, regional, and international levels are used for informative, educational and academic purposes, from a framework of absolute recognition and respect. In no case do I assign myself authorship, relationship or representativeness of heritages, contents and elements belonging to those third parties.
Unless otherwise indicated, the images are photos of my own. The remaining graphic content is used for no-profit goals. Except in those cases in which the authorship can be clearly and unequivocally identified and attributed (in which case, and following the dictates of fair use, the pertinent data will be included), only the original URL will be cited, stating where the image was obtained from. The graphic material will be removed from the site if its intellectual owner, once their rights have been demonstrated, so requests.
The contents published on this website and its associated sites and networks (professional and social), and the ideas, opinions, activities and positions presented in those spaces, have no relationship with, and do not represent, the institutions, organizations or groups with which the author maintains a relationship, whether work-related or professional.
I began my journey in the network of networks with "Bitácora de un bibliotecario", which began operating on December 2, 2004 as one of the first Latin American / Spanish-language weblogs on libraries and librarians. At that time I had just finished my degree in Library Science and Documentation, I had a few years of work experience behind me and I was looking into a still unknown academic world, so in those posts I reflected my concerns and my discoveries, my illusions and my disappointments, my struggles and my encounters. Between 2005 and 2008 I kept an English version in parallel, "The log of a librarian". As of 2009, the posts were sparse, and in 2014 I decided to close the old "Bitacora..." and, with it, a period of my personal and professional life.
With the perspective provided by the years and the path traveled and with the learning accumulated in my backpack, in 2015 I opened a new blog, simply titled "Bibliotecario", heir to the previous one and continuation of many of its works, of many of its ideas and all its values. That space was maintained until 2022. At the same time, in parallel, I developed another series of blogs related to library sciences but very specialized, including the first spaces on indigenous libraries ("Bibliotecas y pueblos originarios", "Bibliotecas indígenas"), orality ("Tradición oral") and indigenous languages ("Palabra indígena").
In addition, I worked on topics related to ethnomusicology, traditional sounds and musical instruments, and I did that in spaces such as "Bitácora de un músico", "Un Sur de sonidos", "Sonidos de Abya Yala", "Vientos de tierra de vientos" (a self-produced Andean music CD) and "Sonidos y silencios". That area had other spaces in parallel, such as the digital magazine of Andean music and culture "Tierra de vientos" or the "Aula abierta de música tradicional".
Finally, as a writer I kept a space called "Bitácora de un escritor", and individual blogs for my different literary works, including "Crónicas de la Serpiente Emplumada", "Espíritus del Viento" and "El Ekeko ".
The enormous multiplicity of spaces was difficult to maintain, and they were progressively reduced, until I managed to concentrate all the contents on this site, where the products are presented in their plural context, intertwining and dialoguing with each other.