Profile

About the site

Edgardo Civallero is a professional website, active since August 2022, where I present 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.

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.

Parallel Spaces | Ecosystems of Work

Alongside this site, I sustain a constellation of independent platforms — semantic, editorial, acoustic, and territorial — each dedicated to a different way of making and transmitting knowledge. They differ in methods and materials, but all share one commitment: to design, preserve, and activate infrastructures where knowledge and memory can resist, transform, and endure.

Tela de Araña is my independent studio for semantic and epistemic architecture, where I conduct my professional consulting and design work. It supports institutions, organizations, and collectives whose knowledge systems face complexity — whether through growth, dispersion of materials, evolving workflows, or the accumulation of legacy structures. The studio integrates diagnosis, structural design, semantic modeling, and editorial implementation to build durable, coherent, and adaptable ecosystems of knowledge and memory.

Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo Editora are self-managed publishing imprints that house work generally excluded from commercial and academic circuits. Wayrachaki Editora focuses on critical librarianship, rebellious archives, decolonial critique, and classification as resistance. El Zorro de Abajo Editora works with traditional music, instrument-making, sonic experimentation, and oral memory. Both produce digital, open-access publications as acts of archiving, persistance, and survival.

Marginalia is an experimental digital journal dedicated to libraries, archives, museums, and the politics of memory. It centers non-hegemonic perspectives, silenced narratives, and decolonial approaches. Built on a low-tech, high-clarity philosophy, it offers layered essays, visual and sonic pieces, hybrid formats, and annotations, supported by a dialogic editorial model that rejects hierarchical peer review.

Instrumentarium brings together my research and documentation on traditional musical instruments — especially those of Latin America — approached from organology, ethnomusicology, and memory studies. It treats sound-producing objects as documents carrying biological, geographic, historical, and cultural information. Its outputs include articles, books, pedagogical materials, recordings, exhibitions, workshops, and research, including a project on musical instrument classification.

estudioparamuno is a sonic and epistemic laboratory rooted in the Colombian high-Andean forest, grounded in an ethnomusicology of absence. I work with materials that scarcely speak — bark, clay, vines, bone, ash — and with instruments that whisper or decay. Here, lo-fi recording becomes a method for listening to what is fragile or unarchived. In the studio I create sound artifacts and ecosystemic narratives shaped by mist, silence, and territorial memory.

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 semantic architect and biblio-naturalist with over twenty-five years of experience weaving memory, knowledge, and ecological thinking across scientific institutions, cultural archives, and community territories. Born in the Puerto de Santa María of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1973, and currently based between Bogotá and Quisquiza, in the Colombian Andes, I design infrastructures that allow scientific collections, archival records, and multilingual knowledge spaces to communicate without erasing the frictions, silences, or pluralities that give them meaning.

My path in Library and Information Science began in 1999 and deepened through a specialization in Southern Epistemologies and a Master's degree in Historical Archives and Memory — after earlier forays into biology and history, which still shape how I think and work. Over time, I moved beyond the rigid boundaries of conventional information work and into the unstable zones where systems break down: where metadata fails, classification collapses complexity, and archives either erase or overexpose the lives they contain. I operate in those interstices, designing semantic and epistemic architectures capable of holding multiplicity without flattening it.

My work integrates ontologies, metadata models, classification systems, semantic pipelines, linked data strategies, editorial architectures, and decolonial critique. I treat knowledge not as static content but as a living, relational ecosystem: one that requires infrastructures able to preserve boundaries, encode context, and enable translation without assimilation.

But I am also a writer, editor, and communicator. I build narratives as well as systems. I translate complexity into clarity, whether through scientific dissemination, critical essays, metadata design, editorial projects, or literary interventions. My practice is rooted in the belief that writing and classification are parallel acts of world-making.

This understanding is shaped by the many identities I have carried: librarian, archivist, blogger, professor, researcher, naturalist, musician, storyteller, translator, instrument maker, illustrator, and cultural worker. Each of them sustains my way of understanding knowledge as something territorial, sonic, embodied, ecological, and political.

Between 2018 and 2023, I worked in the Galápagos Islands, where biodiversity conservation, scientific history, citizen science, degrowth, traditional knowledge, and the preservation of fragile collections converged, and often collided. It was there, in the friction between species, coastlines, archives, and disciplines, that my identity as a biblio-naturalist took shape: an approach that reads ecosystems, soundscapes, libraries, and documentary collections as parallel infrastructures of memory, all of them intimately interwoven. That work continued across the mangroves, forests, and coral reefs of Panama, where I directed the Library & Archive of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (2024–2025), and goes on today in the mist-covered slopes of Quisquiza, where knowledge behaves like climate and memory circulates rather than settles.

Nowadays, I direct Tela de Araña, my consultancy in semantic and epistemic architecture; Marginalia, an experimental digital journal; Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo, two independent imprints dedicated to critical knowledge and cultural memory; and estudioparamuno, an ecological sound-memory project rooted in suspended humidity, mosses, and the slow breathing of the high-Andean forest.

Across these platforms, I design strategies, infrastructures, and stories that challenge how knowledge is organized, preserved, and activated, guided by the conviction that memory is not what remains, but what resists, transforms, and refuses to disappear.

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.