Cliff Lynch RIP

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Last Tuesday Cliff Lynch delivered an abbreviated version of his traditional closing summary and bon voyage to CNI's 2025 Spring Membership Meeting via Zoom from his sick-bed. Last Thursday night he died, still serving as Executive Director. CNI has posted In Memoriam: Clifford Lynch.

Cliff impacted a wide range of areas. The best overview is Mike Ashenfelder's 2013 profile of Cliff Lynch in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Pioneer series, which starts:

Clifford Lynch is widely regarded as an oracle in the culture of networked information. Lynch monitors the global information ecosystem for cultural trends and technological developments. He ponders their variables, interdependencies and influencing factors. He confers with colleagues and draws conclusions. Then he reports his observations through lectures, conference presentations and writings. People who know about Lynch pay close attention to what he has to say.

Lynch is a soft-spoken man whose work, for more than thirty years, has had an impact — directly or indirectly — on the computer, information and library science communities.

Below the fold are some additional personal notes on Cliff's contributions.

Ashenfelder notes Cliff's focus on collaboration:

Lynch is also a catalyst for action. He helps steer the conversation toward real results, such as standards creation, funding, tool development, metadata creation and interoperability. Ultimately, Lynch seems most fervent about collaboration as a crucial force.

“I would be reluctant to attribute much of anything just to my actions,” he said. “Most important successes come through the work of a lot of different people, collaborating and pulling it together. Maybe I can think of a place or two where there was a meeting that I spoke at or convened or I wrote or did something that just happened to fall at a pivotal moment. But any of that to me feels a bit accidental, at best just good luck, being in the right place at the right time.”

Michael Nelson and Herbert Van de Sompel's Cliff Lynch: The Invisible Influencer in Information Infrastructure provides an in-depth account of one occasion when Cliff was "in the right place at the right time" to spark a collaboration. The occasion was an October 1999 meeting in Santa Fe:

In order to further optimize the chances of success for the meeting, the collaboration of Cliff Lynch and Don Waters as moderators had been secured and turned out to be fundamentally important. In the Acknowledgments section of his PhD thesis, Herbert put Cliff’s impact on the direction of the meeting and on his own thinking as follows:

When starting to work on this thesis, I went back reading several of his early papers and could not feel other than intimidated by the far forward-looking vision expressed therein. At several occasions, I heard Cliff address large audiences, discussing complicated digital library matters with an amazing clarity. Cliff's work has always been a great inspiration to me. I met Cliff for the first time in person at the Open Archives meeting in Santa Fe, for which he had enthusiastically accepted my invitation to serve as a moderator. His involvement was crucial to the successful conclusion of the meeting.

...
Prior to the start of the second day, he vented his frustration about the lack of progress to Cliff, who was about to start moderating the first session. Cliff was nice enough to let him ramble on a bit, and, in a manner that exemplified one of Cliff’s many unparalleled capabilities, he went on to open the meeting by providing two discussion topics regarding interoperability that he somehow had been able to synthesize from the first day’s discussions, which most had experienced as enjoyable yet lacking in any sense of concrete direction. One was whether archive functions, such as data collection and maintenance, should be decoupled from user functions, such as search. The other was about the choice between distributed searching across repositories and harvesting from them to build cross-repository search engines.

The meeting solidified the long and productive collaboration between Van de Sompel and Nelson.

But easily the best way to understand how Cliff worked is the Report of ANADP I from 13 years ago. Cliff's "Closing Thoughts" are transcribed verbatim starting on page 309, and they are a wonderful example of his ability to summarize a meeting and set the agenda for future work with an extemporaneous address. You have to read all twelve pages — it is hard to summarize Cliff's summary, but here are a couple of gems:

With a portfolio of aligned strategies, we can collectively speak more effectively about the importance of the work we do, and certainly that has come up in a background way again and again as we’ve spoken about economics, education, about legal issues and barriers. I think that this question of really clarifying the fundamental importance of digital preservation to maintaining the cultural and intellectual record, the memory of our nations and of the world, has got to be a central objective. We have a great challenge in educating both the broad public in our nations and the governments that represent these publics; to the extent that we can align strategies we can make that case better.

And:

There are two words that I didn’t hear in the technical discussions. I get very scared whenever I hear a lengthy discussion of technical issues in digital preservation that doesn’t mention these two words. The first is Monoculture. There is a possibility, a danger, of doing too much alignment here. The reason for that is the second word that I didn’t hear, which is Hubris. We need to acknowledge that we don’t really know how to do long-term digital preservation. We’re going to have a lot more confidence that we know what we’re doing here about a hundred years from now as we look at what efforts actually brought data successfully a hundred years into the future. But in the relatively early stages of technologies like these, it’s much easier to identify failures than long-term successes.

From CNI's In Memoriam:

Active on many advisory boards and visiting committees throughout his career, including serving as co-chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) from 2011-16, Lynch’s contributions were recognized with numerous awards, including the American Library Association’s Joseph W. Lippincott Award, the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Award of Merit, and the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice. He was a past president of the American Society for Information Science, and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Information Standards Organization.

Vicky's and my tributes to Cliff are in three recent blog posts:

• A Prophet Of The Web.
• Our Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture.
• Our contribution to Cliff Lynch's festschrift.

Cliff made a very valuable contribution to my career by inviting me to debug important talks before I gave them "for real" by giving early versions to the the Information Access Seminar at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information. Fortified by tea and cookies, I could talk and then be subject to detailed and insightful questioning by Cliff and the participants. I always meant to take notes during the questioning but I was so into it I never did. I had to re-construct the necessary changes to the talk from memory.

This search returns ten talks I gave to the Information Access Seminar. In date order they are:

1. 7^th November 2008 "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents" Revisited. I discussed the eventual talk here.
2. 16^th November 2012 The Truth Is Out There: Preservation and the Cloud. The eventual talk is here.
3. 7^th March 2014 The Half-Empty Archive. The talk is here.
4. 2^nd October 2015 Emulation as a Strategy for Digital Preservation. The talk is here.
5. 20^th October 2017 The Amnesiac Society. The talk is here.
6. 2^nd November 2018 Blockchain: What's Not To Like?. The talk is here.
7. 5^th February 2021 Securing the Digital Supply Chain. The talk is here.
8. 19^th November 2021 Blockchain: What’s Not To Like?. This was a reprise of this one.
9. 12^th April 2024 Decentralized Systems Aren’t. The talk is here.
10. 14^th March 2025 Archival Storage. The talk is here.

These talks are not Cliff's only appearances on my blog. Apart from the recent three, there are:

1. 15^th June 2013 Cliff Lynch flags the Library of Congress profile and Cliff's article on e-books for American Libraries.
2. 20^th November 2013 Patio Perspectives at ANADP II: Preserving the Other Half which links to and was largely inspired by the report of ANADP I discussed above.
3. 18^th October 2016 Why Did Institutional Repositories Fail? discusses a blog post and PDF in which Richard Poynder interviews Cliff.
4. 18^th May 2017 "Privacy is dead, get over it" features a review of Cliff's The rise of reading analytics and the emerging calculus of reader privacy in the digital world.
5. 7^th December 2017 Cliff Lynch's Stewardship in the "Age of Algorithms" is a review of his important First Monday article.