Notes

This short narrative text presents a series of reflective chronicles situated in the Andean highlands of central Colombia, specifically within the historical territory of the Muisca (Chibcha) people in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense. Through observational prose anchored in everyday experience — morning rituals, encounters with local fauna, and immersion in a high-Andean ecosystem of fog, páramo vegetation, and montane forests — the work interweaves ethnographic attention, environmental awareness, and documentary memory. It engages with elements of Muisca cosmology and language, drawing on sources such as Ezequiel Uricoechea's Gramática, vocabulario, catecismo i confesionario de la lengua chibcha (1871), to reconstruct fragments of Indigenous belief systems, including funerary imaginaries involving spider webs as vessels for crossing into the afterlife. These references are juxtaposed with broader comparative traditions, such as the Akan figure of Anansi, situating local knowledge within trans-cultural networks of myth and narrative.

A second narrative axis centers on the hummingbird (colibrí), explored through a multiplicity of linguistic, cultural, and historical registers. The text traces its names and meanings across regions and traditions — quynza in Muysccubun, qinti in Quechua, mainumby in Guaraní, and tominejo in early colonial Spanish accounts — while incorporating literary and historical sources including Eduardo Galeano, Alfredo Mires, Martín Sarmiento, and Bernardino de Sahagún. These layered references construct the hummingbird as both biological presence and symbolic mediator, associated with cosmological functions such as soul-bearing and divine communication in Mesoamerican and South American traditions. The resulting narrative operates at the intersection of natural history, ethno-ornithology, linguistic memory, and cultural semiotics.

Across both chronicles, the text articulates a mode of situated librarianship in which observation, reading, memory, and place-based knowledge converge. The figure of the librarian emerges not as an institutional agent but as a mediator between written sources, oral traditions, ecological perception, and personal experience. By embedding bibliographic traces within lived landscapes, the work redefines documentation as an embodied and relational practice, where archives are not confined to texts but extend into territories, species, languages, and sensory experience.

This collection of critical notes offers a sustained reflection on contemporary librarianship and information sciences through a series of short, essayistic interventions addressing professional practices, institutional logics, and broader socio-technical transformations. Across its fragments, it examines themes such as "human libraries," service automation and robotics, predatory journals, statistical misuse, technological determinism, planned obsolescence, and the rhetoric of sustainability, situating them within a critical analysis of late modern societies marked by acceleration, commodification, and epistemic fragility. Drawing on references ranging from Langdon Winner's concept of technological somnambulism to Robert Engelman's critique of "sustainababble," as well as figures such as Nicanor Parra, Eduardo Galeano, and Peter Singer, the text interrogates how libraries and information professionals adopt trends, reproduce dominant paradigms, and often fail to question the underlying assumptions of innovation, progress, and neutrality.

At the same time, the work foregrounds structural inequalities shaping knowledge production, access, and preservation, including the dynamics of academic extraction, the enclosure of oral archives, the marginalization of Indigenous and minority epistemologies, and the persistence of colonial and "abyssal" divisions described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. It critically examines practices such as book donation campaigns, "ethnic" content categorization, and visibility initiatives, revealing how they may reproduce symbolic violence, tokenism, or epistemic exclusion rather than fostering genuine inclusion or transformation. Through concrete examples — from indigenous communities rejecting imposed library models to the biases embedded in platforms like Wikipedia — the text emphasizes the need to rethink documentary practices, metadata, and institutional frameworks in light of plural, situated knowledge systems.

Ultimately, these notes articulate a call for an ethically grounded, socially committed, and critically aware librarianship, capable of resisting herd behavior, technological fetishism, and market-driven models. They advocate for adaptive, context-sensitive library designs, recognition of oral and non-written memory, equitable access to cultural heritage, and the dismantling of barriers that silence marginalized voices. In doing so, the text redefines libraries as spaces of encounter between communities and knowledge, emphasizing human interaction, solidarity, and epistemic diversity as foundational principles for the future of information work.