Recently Clifford Lynch, director of CNI, passed away.
It was in February this year, that I saw on the program of iDCC2025 that Cliff Lynch would do the Closing Remarks session. Living nearby in Amsterdam, I asked him whether we could meet each other in The Hague. I wanted to hear his view on some of the topics I will describe in my book about digital preservation. But medical issues prevented him to travel and he was so kind to offer a Zoom meeting instead. It was a great conversation. Sadly, his encouraging words “keep in touch” will not come true.
Cliff Lynch was a real digital preservation pioneer, who presented his vision and intelligent insights on many conferences. The digital preservation community lost an important visionary person, who often addressed new and relevant developments in an effort to make us aware at an early stage of things to come. I remember my conversation with him about his article Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms” in 2017 in a corridor during a break at a conference, balancing on fragile chairs.
We can be grateful that we still have his articles and presentations. Even his articles from 30 years ago read like written yesterday and are often still relevant, also for the clear way the issues are phrased.
Without doubt, more evidence of his influence in the world of libraries and the scholarly record will be described in the Festschrift that was announced by CNI and that will be published in July as open access.
Joan K. Lippincott, ed. “Networking Networks: A Festschrift Honoring Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, 1997-2025.” Supplement to portal: Libraries and the Academy 25, no. 2 (July 2025).