Foreword
Editor's Note
In the summer of 2024, Clifford Lynch announced his retirement as executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) after 28 years at its helm. CNI quietly launched a project to create this Festschrift to document and honor his legacy. Authors began contributing articles in early 2025, with a planned publication date of July 2025. Since the final membership meeting of Cliff's tenure was April 7–8 in Milwaukee, the plan was to surprise him, surrounded by colleagues and friends, with a presentation of the table of contents of this special issue. However, just two weeks prior to the meeting, Cliff's health worsened; he was told about the Festschrift and received project details and articles. Though unable to attend in person, he participated in the CNI membership meeting via Zoom and also virtually joined his retirement reception, which included readings of excerpts from each article in this volume. Sadly, on April 10, 2025, Clifford Lynch passed away. Festschrift contributors wrote their articles prior to his passing, and we have chosen not to alter their original language.
Clifford A. Lynch has left an indelible mark of wisdom and intellectual curiosity on the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), on our profession, and on the pursuit of intellectual productivity. It is rare in higher education and technology circles to establish a legacy that is felt by your organization, by your profession, by numerous associations and societies, and by hundreds if not thousands of colleagues across the globe. It is even rarer to build such a legacy without a single trace of the hubris or caustic personality that so often accompanies genius. Cliff's humility, gentle but persistent persuasion, and remarkable good nature are the key elements of his indelible mark.
As the executive leaders of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE, we wish to acknowledge and celebrate Cliff's vast contributions to our fields and to our organizations. In 1997, at a difficult time after the sudden death of CNI's first executive director, ARL and EDUCAUSE selected Cliff to lead CNI. Our organizations provide the oversight for CNI through our leadership and our boards. Cliff's interests and his formulation of CNI's program reflect the priorities of our organizations, and he provides a bridge between the perspectives of research librarians and those of academic information technologists.
For over three decades, Cliff has stood at the forefront of digital transformation in scholarly communication and information science. When he assumed leadership of CNI in 1997, the digital landscape was markedly different from today's interconnected world. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, dial-up modems were the norm, and most academic journals remained primarily print-based. Digital libraries had just begun to emerge, and concepts we now take for granted—institutional repositories, widespread open access, and seamless cross-institutional authentication—were still years away.
At the end of the last century, a PDF (portable document format) was a novelty. Amazon was merely a fledgling online bookstore, and primitive web search was dominated by AltaVista and Yahoo! The phrase "social media" and the handheld devices that would make it popular had yet to emerge. Meanwhile, the academic community grappled with new challenges. The cyberinfrastructure lacked bandwidth, storage capacity, standards, and scholarly communication workflows. Scholars had to comply [End Page 1] with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a federal law to combat the theft of electronic media such as software, games, videos, or music. They also faced the looming threat of the Y2K problem, potential errors resulting from computer programs that abbreviated four-digit years as two digits to save memory space. Such programs might not, for example, recognize 00 as 2000, perhaps interpreting it to mean 1900. In this context, Cliff's visionary leadership began to shape how we would think about, preserve, and share knowledge in the digital age.
Cliff's journey began with his doctoral work in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he laid the groundwork for understanding the intersection of technology and information systems. His subsequent role as director of library automation at the University of California Office of the President demonstrated his unique ability to bridge theoretical understanding with practical implementation, a skill that he nurtured and perfected when he came to CNI.
At CNI, Cliff's research agenda has been remarkably comprehensive and forward-looking. He has been a pioneering voice in the development and implementation of institutional repositories, conducting crucial early analyses of their role in scholarly communication and their potential to transform academic publishing. His work on authentication systems, identity management, and privacy in digital libraries has helped establish frameworks for secure and accessible scholarly resources.
A significant portion of his research has provided insights on digital preservation, where he has explored both technical and organizational challenges. His writings on the safekeeping of social media, web archives, and research data have helped institutions understand the scope and complexity of digital stewardship. He has been particularly insightful in identifying the challenges of preserving complex digital objects and maintaining their authenticity over time.
Cliff has also been a leading voice in the evolution of scholarly communication. His research has examined how new forms of digital scholarship, including multimedia content, interactive databases, and digital humanities projects, challenge traditional models of peer review, publication, and preservation. He has written extensively about the implications of open access publishing and its impact on academic institutions and scholarly societies. His writings on authentication, metadata, and search systems have become foundational texts in the field.
Furthermore, his work has addressed the changing nature of research infrastructure, exploring how shared computing resources, data repositories, and collaborative platforms are reshaping scholarly practice. He has been particularly interested in the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and scholarly inquiry, examining both the opportunities and ethical challenges these technologies present.
Never one to be satisfied with past accomplishments, Cliff navigated the CNI community through several sea changes as well. They included industry- and society-driven developments such as online learning, the advent of AI, and net neutrality, the principle that Internet service providers should treat all data traveling over their networks equally, without favoring a particular app, site, or service. Some challenges were unpredictable, such as those of leading a membership organization accustomed to meeting in person twice per year through the COVID-19 pandemic. Cliff not only ensured that CNI's content delivery is timely and prescient but also supported new learning and sharing platforms [End Page 2] such as Hallway Conversations and Executive Roundtables. He backed the Designing Libraries meeting, an annual conference that gathers librarians, architects, planners, and information technologists to discuss the planning of libraries for the twenty-first century. He also promoted the Senior Scholars Program, which provides opportunities for respected, authoritative voices to develop and share their work. Cliff has done a remarkable job of nurturing CNI's evolution in a fast-moving world.
Importantly, Cliff's untiring attention to coalition-building and networking (two ideas that appear in the CNI name) has been instrumental in advancing both the library and technology fields. There are few people in our space whom Cliff does not know on a first-name basis. Cliff is frequently the go-to when advice is needed, but he has also developed a comprehensive network that synthesizes industry, society, and governmental feedback for our easy consumption. Among his many superpowers, Cliff's ability to distill large amounts of information is widely acknowledged. Beyond the sprawling range of his intellectual curiosity, it is his deep understanding of a wide array of information, standards, and policies and their accompanying publications and presentations that amazes and astounds his peers.
What distinguishes Cliff's contributions is not just their technical depth but their humanitarian vision. He has consistently emphasized that digital technologies must serve the broader goals of scholarship, education, and cultural memory. His work reflects a deep understanding that technical solutions must be designed with human needs and social contexts in mind.
This Festschrift brings together scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders whose work has been influenced by Cliff's ideas and leadership. The contributions span a wide range of topics, from digital preservation to scholarly communication and from infrastructure development to policy frameworks, reflecting the breadth of Cliff's influence and interests.
As we stand at a crucial juncture in the evolution of digital scholarship, with AI, big data, and new forms of scholarly communication reshaping our information landscape, Cliff's insights remain more relevant than ever. His emphasis on thoughtful integration of technology with human needs and institutional practices continues to guide our field's development.
This volume celebrates not just Cliff's past contributions but also the ongoing influence of his ideas in shaping the future of digital scholarship. Each article builds upon foundations he helped establish, while pointing toward new horizons in our understanding of networked information and its role in society.
We invite readers to explore these contributions as both a tribute to Clifford Lynch's legacy and an examination of the critical challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in our increasingly networked scholarly ecosystem. [End Page 3]
Andrew K. Pace is the executive director of the Association of Research Libraries; he may be reached by email at [email protected].
Andrew Pace became executive director of the Association of Research Libraries in 2024. He leads a team of experts on scholarly communication, policy, advocacy, education, data, governance, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for ARL's 125 member libraries. Prior to ARL, Pace was executive director for the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions library consortium. He held executive director positions at OCLC from 2008 to 2022, where he managed cloud-based application development and later led teams in OCLC Research focused on metadata policy, data science, and applied research. Pace was head of information technology at North Carolina State University Libraries from 1999 to 2007. He serves on the American Library Association (ALA) Council and was elected to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Board of Directors in 2023. He is the author of several works dealing with library technology, product and project management, and community building.
John O'Brien is the president and chief executive officer of EDUCAUSE; he may be reached by email at [email protected].
John O'Brien is the president and chief executive officer of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association dedicated to the advancement of higher education through information technology. He was a faculty leader in instructional technology, a statewide IT project head, and associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer at the system level. He has been a college provost and president in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, the fourth-largest higher education system in the United States, with over 375,000 students. Prior to his appointment at EDUCAUSE, he served as the Minnesota system's senior vice chancellor of academic and student affairs.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
