Baca received a PhD in Art History and Italian Language and Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
She accrued three decades of experience as an implementer and teacher of descriptive metadata and controlled vocabularies for art and architecture.
She was a Lecturer at the UCLA Department of Information Studies from 1988 to 2017, teaching graduate seminars in Indexing & Thesaurus Construction and Metadata.
[5] Baca was a leader in various professional organizations and groups related to controlled vocabularies, descriptive metadata, and digital art history.
She was chair of the International Terminology Working Group, an organization of cultural heritage documentation professionals founded ca.