José F. Sánchez

Library science is not a quiet profession. It is a set of powerful, unglamorous techniques for deciding what survives. Selection and acquisition decide what enters the record. Cataloguing and authority control decide whether it can ever be found again. Controlled vocabularies and indexing decide what a thing is about, which is to say who it is for. Preservation decides how long it lasts. Diffusion decides whether any of it mattered. Apply those six operations to a heritage that is being lost and you are not filing — you are intervening.

I was born in Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, and trained at the Colegio de Bibliotecología of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. From there I went into the places where information becomes public infrastructure: the Bicentenario, INEHRM, INAH, the Secretaría de Cultura, the Consejería Jurídica de la CDMX. I designed and ran the Biblioteca Digital y Sistema Internet del Bicentenario — a digital library plus a constellation of portals, an accessibility portal, an English edition and interactive works — built to hand two centuries of national memory back to the people who own it.

In parallel I learned to build the machines myself: Linux, Apache, PHP, Node, catalogues, search, measurement, storefronts. Not because engineering is more interesting than bibliography, but because a librarian who cannot build cannot ship. Today that lets me open a library without a budget, a committee, or anybody's permission.

“La biblioteca como una extensión duradera de la memoria ha formado parte a través de toda la historia evolutiva del ser humano.”Sánchez González, 2014 · Cap. 1.1

The other half of the work is money, and I say so plainly. Preservation is expensive, grants are political, and projects that depend on a change of administration die with it — I documented exactly that in my thesis. So I sell. I build stores, catalogues, funnels and measurement stacks for a living, and that revenue underwrites archives that charge nobody and answer to nobody.

I write, I paint, I make images, I have performed in contemporary art spaces, and I read and work in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese. These are not hobbies attached to a librarian. They are how a librarian gets close enough to an intangible heritage — a language, a ceremony, a calendar, a way of naming plants — to describe it without flattening it.

Curatorial position, stated once: nothing here is “rescued”. Communities are not collections. Consent, attribution and the right to say no come before the record — the CARE principles alongside FAIR, and UNDRIP above both.

Chapter 1 defines the digital library: origins, advantages and costs, the role of the bibliotecólogo in the information society, and a forecast. Chapter 2 reconstructs the institutional scaffolding of the Bicentenario — the 2006 decree, the 2007 Programa Base, the digital strategy, the 2009 accord. Chapter 3 documents the system I built and operated, item by item: each portal with its URL, operating system, server, language, CMS, W3C accessibility level and traffic — closing with results and a proposal for continuous improvement.

Four arguments run through it, and they are still the arguments I work from:

— Accessibility is the definition of public. A collection that excludes by ability, language, bandwidth or income is not public, whatever the press release says.
— Cataloguing is not clerical. Controlled vocabulary, indexing and authority control are what separate a collection from a pile.
— Digitisation without diffusion is a statistic. Counting scanned documents nobody can reach only fattens a government report.
— The platforms took our job. The most successful “libraries” of this century are run by companies that found the economic value of information and turned the library into a soft drink — while public efforts die with each change of administration.

Further reading: DGB UNAM · IIBI UNAM · IFLA · UNESCO Open Science · W3C WAI · INEHRM · INAH

Material heritage has defenders: institutes, budgets, restoration programmes, laws. Immaterial heritage — a way of naming a plant, a count of days, a song sung once a year, a technique held by four people in one village — has almost none, because it does not sit still long enough to be inventoried by conventional means. It has to be recorded with consent, described in the language it lives in, and returned to the community before it is released to anyone else.

That is the standard I work to. Documentation in Yucatec Maya and Náhuatl alongside Spanish, English and French. Attribution to communities, not to me. Nothing published that a community has asked to keep. Formats that outlive platforms, and a catalogue that survives a change of government.

Between 2024 and 2025 I served as senior project and programme manager on the Mayan Bioregion Initiative, a transnational effort joining ecological preservation, cultural regeneration and sustainable development across Mesoamerica — systems thinking and digital tooling put at the service of biocultural heritage and the communities holding it.

The fieldwork happens where I live: Sisbichén, Mérida, Playa del Carmen, Tulum. Interviews, calendars, plant knowledge, oral history, video. Then the library work: describe, index, translate, preserve, publish, promote — and find the funds to do it again next year.

Related frameworks: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage · INALI · INPI · WIPO Traditional Knowledge · UNDRIP

Look at what a storefront actually is. A SKU is a call number. A product title, description and attribute set are a bibliographic record. Categories, tags and collections are a classification scheme; the filter sidebar is a faceted search interface that any cataloguer would recognise from a thesaurus. Variants are editions. Inventory is holdings. The feed you push to Google Merchant, Meta or Pinterest is an exchange format — MARC by another name, with the same problem of normalising fields between systems that were never designed to speak.

And the rest follows. Authority control is what stops the same product existing three times under three spellings. Controlled vocabulary is what makes search return the thing the customer meant instead of the thing they typed. Collection development is merchandising. Weeding is discontinuing. Preservation is your backups and your data retention policy. Circulation statistics are GA4.

This is why I can hold both halves of my life in one hand. When I build a measurement stack — data layer, GTM, Consent Mode v2, server-side events, Meta CAPI — I am building an instrument that tells a collection what its users actually did with it. When I integrate third-party APIs, print-on-demand nodes, payment gateways and fulfilment networks, I am building interlibrary loan.

“The most successful digital libraries of our era are run by companies that discovered the economic value of information.”Paraphrase · thesis, Cap. 1.5

My thesis said the platforms had taken the librarian's job. The answer was not to complain about it. The answer was to learn the trade well enough to do it better and point the proceeds somewhere honest. So the same hands that catalogue a day-sign also write the product taxonomy, the conversion copy, the A/B test and the tracking plan.

Big data, data science, inventory systems, connectivity to third parties, tracking and statistics — none of that is foreign to bibliotecología. It is bibliotecología, running at commercial speed with a budget attached. Ultra-modern library science, exactly where commerce bridges with open knowledge: the store funds the Mayan Library, the Mexican Library, the continental bioregion libraries and the Worldwide Library Initiative, and the libraries give the store something worth wearing.

Selling well is not a compromise of the mission. It is the mechanism of the mission.

I paint, I make digital images, and I work with projection and live performance. The interest is the same as in the archive: what an image carries, how it is transmitted, and what survives of it once the moment ends. Performance is the most immaterial heritage there is — it exists only while it happens, and only documentation keeps it.

Recent and ongoing work moves between both: a Mayan comic generated from a person's own birth data, crowdfunded through Kickstarter for the Mayan Library; documentary interviews on living Mayan culture in Tulum; and the visual identity of the entire SESY ecosystem, drawn rather than templated.

Ongoing: painting and drawing · digital image · Mayan comic from Cholq'ij birth data (Kickstarter) · documentary interviews published by the Mayan Library · the SESY visual system.