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This site, launched in August 2022, compiles a series of contents, professional and otherwise, that I have been producing since 2000 and that I have presented online through a number of spaces, especially blogs, magazines and digital columns, and social networks. At the same time, it serves as a platform for current and future publications in my areas of interest, especially library and information science.
On the page of publications, I account for archives and other places of storage of my intellectual production, whereas in my blog (based on Medium) I continue to write periodically about libraries and archives.
All content related to music and (ethno)musicology has been moved to the website Instrumentarium.
I am a multifaceted professional with 25 years of experience, born in the Puerto de Santa María of Buenos Aires (1973). I became a librarian in 1999 and, in 2004, graduated in Library Science and Documentation from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). There, I also studied Biology and History (Anthropology and Archaeology branch), although much earlier I had studied Marine Sciences at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). After a long and varied professional career (including a specialization in Epistemologies of the South and a master's degree in Historical Archiving and Memory), since 2024 I have been living between Panama (where I direct the library of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) and Bogotá (Colombia), from where I work as a consultant on a wide variety of knowledge and memory management projects and content production.
I consider myself a weaver of memories. I use my rich experience in all traditional roles in information sciences and knowledge management, along with my research skills, to identify the threads with which human knowledge and memories are built. To this, I add specific approaches, such as critical and social library science positions and "rogue" archival science, decolonizing perspectives, views from the margins, activism, resistance, and dialogues between libraries, archives, and museums to build new knowledge and recover old stories, as well as my own findings on natural sciences, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, memory, identity, and sounds and silences, which I develop as a teacher, researcher, and writer.
From this plural and interdisciplinary perspective, I use content production, translation, graphic design, and editorial correction to build narratives that give meaning to my work. And I add all the technologies at my disposal: from metadata, linked data, ontologies, semantic web, and knowledge classification to Digital Asset Management, digital preservation, data management and curation, programming, artificial intelligence, and IT solutions. Everything is useful for weaving memories. And in doing so, I place special emphasis on the intersection of libraries, archives, and museums as spaces for knowledge and memory management that should be one. Just as human cultural heritage is.
I understand and defend the library as a committed space, of socio-political activism and militancy, and of cultural, identity, and collective resistance.
My work in the Galápagos Islands (2018-2023) linked me to fields such as the history and memory of science, open science, e-research, biodiversity and environmental conservation, citizen science, biomimicry, sustainability and degrowth, as well as knowledge mobilization, communication, dissemination, and environmental education, and preservation, conservation, and digitization of heritage collections.
Since 2004, I have been part of several sections and groups of the IFLA, worked with the UDC Consortium (Universal Decimal Classification), participated in various editorial committees and digital research and debate spaces, taught classes and lectures, and wrote dissemination texts on topics of interest, which I publish through my independent proposals Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo Editora.
In addition to being a librarian, I am a musician: a multi-instrumentalist acceptable in everything and virtuous in nothing, interpreter of traditional Latin American and European music. The sounds and silences of the world interest me, as well as the many stories they tell, and I feel a special inclination towards the relationship of this sound heritage with memory and identity. I investigate and share the results through a wide range of digital dissemination publications, compose and interpret music, build instruments, explore other sound horizons, and create new personal research projects online.
Beyond libraries and music, I am a reviewer, translator, and editorial designer, as well as a former printing worker, an avid language learner, a frustrated fiction writer, a blogger with 20 years of experience behind me, a Wikipedian and Esperantist, a citizen scientist apprentice, a draftsman and photographer, and a puppet builder.
My contact email address is edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com.
I am present on several social networks, the shortcuts to which are displayed in the bar at the bottom of this page.
I also belong to a number of academic networks. In three of them I present and share most of my publications: Google Scholar, Research Gate and Academia.edu. All have been strongly debated for their ethical principles and action models; however, they present a number of useful utilities.
Finally, I participate in other academic-professional structures, such as Web of Science, Scopus, Mendeley and Zotero.
I embarked on 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 weblogs about libraries and librarians. At that time, I had just finished my degree in Library Science and Documentation, had a few years of work experience behind me, and was delving into a still unknown academic world. In those entries, I reflected on my concerns, discoveries, illusions, disappointments, struggles, and encounters. Between 2005 and 2008, I maintained an English version in parallel, titled "The log of a librarian". From 2009 onwards, the frequency of publications became less frequent, and in 2014, I decided to close the old "Bitácora..." marking the end of a stage in my personal and professional life.
With the perspective gained from the years and the journey traveled, and with the accumulated learnings in my backpack, I opened a new blog in 2015, simply titled "Librarian", inheriting the legacy of the previous blog and continuing many of its works, ideas and values. This space was maintained until 2022. Simultaneously, I developed other specialized blogs related to librarianship, including the first spaces on indigenous libraries ("Bibliotecas y pueblos originarios", "Bibliotecas indígenas"), orality ("Tradición oral"), and indigenous languages ("Palabra indígena").
Additionally, I explored topics related to ethnomusicology, traditional sounds, and musical instruments in spaces such as "Bitácora de un músico", "Un Sur de sonidos", "Sounds of Abya Yala", "Vientos de tierra de vientos" (a CD of Andean music of my own production), and "Sonidos y silencios". This area also included other parallel spaces such as the digital magazine of Andean music and culture "Tierra de vientos" or the "Aula abierta de música tradicional".
Lastly, as a writer, I maintained 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 vast multiplicity of spaces became difficult to maintain, and gradually, they were consolidated until all the content was centralized on this site, where the products are presented in their plural context, intertwined and in dialogue with each other.