Profile

About the site

Edgardo Civallero is a professional website, active since August 2022, presenting my work as a librarian, semantic consultant, archivist, and specialist in knowledge management, digital preservation, and cultural memory.

This space brings together, organizes, and connects the various threads of my professional, intellectual, and creative work. It gathers the strands I've been weaving since 2000 across different digital platforms —blogs, columns, journals, and social networks— now curated within a coherent environment that reflects both my path and my current perspective.

This is not a showcase or a repository. It is a space for articulation and thought, a living tool for critical professional practice, and an open invitation to rethink knowledge from other edges.

I invite you to explore my publications, get to know my projects and lines of work, and connect around new ways of managing, preserving, and narrating knowledge.

Content related to music and (ethno)musicology —central to my work on sound heritage and identity memory— has been moved to the website Instrumentarium.

Blogs

This site brings together five blogs. Each one explores a different dimension of my work with libraries, archives, science, memory, and culture. While they differ in tone and focus, they all share a critical perspective on how knowledge is produced, organized, and contested.

Chronicles of a biblio-naturalist explores the intersections of biodiversity, conservation, science, knowledge, and memory — connecting libraries, archives, fieldwork, and traditional knowledges to reveal the hidden narratives that shape our planet.

The Log of a Librarian critically examines libraries, archives, and the politics of knowledge — engaging with social responsibility, decolonial perspectives, oral traditions, and the struggles of marginalized communities within knowledge spaces.

Critical notes is a space for radical reflections, where tensions between information, politics, and culture come to the fore. It's a place where certainties are questioned, ideas collide, and the role of knowledge in shaping the world is put to the test.

Cajón de sastre (a Spanish expression which literally translates as "a tailor's drawer" and that actually means "a mixed or grab bag, a catch-all") is a space without rigid boundaries — where diverse themes converge, always rooted in the worlds of libraries, knowledge, and memory. It welcomes unexpected explorations, surprising connections, and reflections that don't fit elsewhere, yet illuminate new ways of thinking about information and culture.

Last but not least, The words that weave the Earth addresses the vital role of libraries and archives in preserving endangered languages. From producing grassroots grammars and community dictionaries to managing oral archives and designing revitalization strategies, this blog explores how linguistic memory is woven into identity, resistance, and cultural survival in a constantly shifting world.

Together, these blogs form a web: a critical cartography of how knowledge circulates, disappears, and is rebuilt.

The author

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 earned my degree in Library and Information Science in 2004 from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina), where I also studied Biology and History (Anthropology and Archaeology). Earlier, I pursued Marine Sciences at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). After a long and varied career —including a specialization in Epistemologies of the South and a master's degree in Historical Archiving and Memory— I have been based since 2024 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 range of knowledge and memory management projects and content production initiatives.

I define myself as a memory weaver. I draw on extensive experience across traditional roles in information science and knowledge management, along with strong research skills, to trace the threads through which human knowledge and memory are constructed. To this I add a set of distinctive approaches —critical and social librarianship, "rogue" archival practice, decolonial perspectives, marginal viewpoints, activist and militant stances— and the integration of libraries, archives, and museums as interconnected spaces for generating knowledge and recovering hidden histories. I work with themes like natural sciences, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, identity, and sound/silence — as a teacher, researcher, and writer.

Through this plural and interdisciplinary lens, I combine content production, translation, graphic design, and editorial work to craft narratives that give meaning to what I do. I also deploy every available technology — from metadata, linked data, ontologies, semantic web tools, and classification systems, to digital asset management, preservation workflows, data curation, programming, AI, and IT solutions. Everything is useful for weaving memory. And in doing so, I emphasize the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums as unified knowledge and memory systems — just as human cultural heritage itself is.

As a semantic consultant, I work at the points where institutional knowledge systems break down — or where they fail to convey what matters. My role is to intervene: not only by modeling ontologies or mapping metadata, but by helping scientific and memory-based institutions rethink the structures through which they organize, access, and share knowledge. I translate between disciplines, between technologies and lived experience, and between disconnected datasets — offering strategies that are technically sound, culturally grounded, and narratively aware.

I understand and defend libraries as committed spaces of socio-political activism, cultural resistance, and collective identity.

My work in the Galápagos Islands (2018-2023) linked me to fields like history and memory of science, open science, e-research, biodiversity conservation, citizen science, biomimicry, sustainability and degrowth, as well as knowledge mobilization, science communication, environmental education, and the preservation and digitization of heritage collections. It was at this intersection of biodiversity and memory that I began shaping my identity as a biblio-naturalist: exploring how libraries, archives, and knowledge spaces can be central to understanding and conserving biodiversity, supporting community resilience, and strengthening the connections between science, territory, and identity — a path I continue to deepen today across the tropical forests, mangroves, and coral coasts of Panama.

Since 2004 I have been active in various IFLA sections and working groups, collaborated with the Universal Decimal Classification Consortium, participated in editorial boards and digital research spaces, taught courses and given lectures, and published essays and outreach materials through my independent publishing projects: Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo Editora.

Alongside my work as a librarian, I'm a musician — a multi-instrumentalist, competent in many instruments though master of none, focused on traditional Latin American and European music. I'm drawn to the world's sounds and silences, to the many stories they tell, and especially to the relationship between sound heritage, memory, and identity. I research and share findings through digital publications, compose and perform music, build instruments, explore new soundscapes, and develop personal research projects online.

Beyond libraries and music, I'm also an editor, translator, and graphic designer; a former printing house worker; an avid language learner; a frustrated fiction writer; a blogger with two decades of experience; a Wikipedian and Esperantist; a citizen science apprentice; a sketch artist and photographer; and a puppet maker.

Contact and networks

You can reach me by email at edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com.

I've reduced my digital presence to focus on platforms that matter to me. I'm active on LinkedIn and Instagram, while I maintain only a minimal presence on Facebook. You'll find links in the website footer.

You can also find me on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

History

I began my online journey with Bitácora de un bibliotecario ("Log of a Librarian"), launched on December 2, 2004, as one of the first Latin American and Spanish-language weblogs focused on libraries and librarianship. At the time, I had just finished my degree in Library and Information Science, with only a few years of work experience behind me, and I was stepping into an academic world still unknown to me. In those early posts, I reflected on my concerns and discoveries, my hopes and disappointments, my struggles and my connections. From 2005 to 2008, I maintained a parallel version in English under the same title. After 2009, my posting frequency slowed, and in 2014, I chose to close the original blog — bringing to an end a personal and professional chapter of my life.

With the distance of years and the lessons gathered along the way, I launched a new blog in 2015, simply titled Bibliotecario. It inherited the spirit of the earlier bitácora, continuing many of its themes, ideas, and values. That blog remained active until 2022. In parallel, I developed a series of more specialized blogs related to librarianship, including the first dedicated spaces on Indigenous libraries (Bibliotecas y pueblos originarios, Bibliotecas indígenas), orality (Tradición oral), and Indigenous languages (Palabra indígena).

At the same time, I explored topics related to ethnomusicology, traditional soundscapes, and musical instruments through projects like Bitácora de un músico, Un Sur de sonidos, Sounds of Abya Yala, Vientos de tierra de vientos (a self-produced album of Andean music), and Sonidos y silencios. This area of work was also reflected in parallel initiatives such as the digital magazine Tierra de vientos (focused on Andean music and culture) and the Aula abierta de música tradicional.

As a writer, I maintained a space titled Bitácora de un escritor, as well as dedicated blogs for each of my literary works, including Crónicas de la Serpiente Emplumada, Espíritus del viento, and El Ekeko.

Managing such a wide array of spaces eventually became unsustainable. Over time, I gradually consolidated everything into this site, where each piece is presented within a plural context — allowing the different projects to intersect and dialogue with one another.