In memoriam: Cliff Lynch, 1954-2025

This month we lost a major figure in the information and library space. Cliff Lynch, the leader of the Coalition for Networked Information, was an enormously influential thinker, organizer, and supporter.  He was also a good friend.

You can read about him at that Wikipedia entry.  CNI also has an excellent memorial page.  Here I’d like to share a personal reflection.  These remarks are brief because this was very hard to write.

I met Cliff through CNI, which I first attended in 2004.  Then I was with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a nonprofit which worked with small colleges across the United States.  We led a delegation of two dozen (I think) librarians and chief information officers to a CNI meeting, helping connect the liberal arts world with the big informatics one. I was deeply impressed by CNI. The quality of presentations was very high, driven by the request that presenters show ongoing and emerging projects. The event was sized and structured just right to allow every participant and presenter access to all others.  The crowd’s mood was buzzing, excited, open, and very convivial.

At CNI Cliff deeply impressed me. He opened the event and kindly welcomed newcomers with a special session for them, then became a quiet, nearly universal presence through each session. He was clearly listening, soaking up conversations and ideas. He was always thoughtful and supportive with each participant. You could see people relying on Cliff for feedback and conversation, no matter the topic.

Then Cliff addressed the whole conference to give his overview of where libraries and informatics were headed, and wow! He had so much expertise and knowledge ready to hand, yet elegantly and accessibly conveyed. He used no Powerpoint but held the audience (including me) mesmerized.   His understanding was international and crossed all kinds of intellectual domains, from computer science and archives to economics and geopolitics, academic structures and the human experience. I’ve never heard anyone else, before or since, with that grasp of the field and that effect a presentation style.

After that 2004 introduction I returned to CNI again and again. I always learned and connected with people.  That’s where I met some heroes, like Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle. I saw plenty of projects in mid-stream and was able to give feedback.  Cliff’s annual tour d’horizon was vital for my work and thinking.

Eventually CNI let me present to some sessions, which was reliably a good experience.  Interesting people attended and talked with me (and my copresenters). Feedback was useful.  Then it was a signal honor of my career when in 2014 Cliff invited me to address the conference in conversation with him, then to tag-team a breakout session right afterwards.

Over the years I grew to know Cliff and relished our conversations.  He was happy to talk with me about copyright, new technologies, science fiction, climate change, academic business models, library automation, the poetics of games. and more.  I could run anything I was working on past him and he’d give sensible, thoughtful advice.

As long as I knew him Cliff helped me think and work better, and I know the same is true of a lot of other people.  His humility and ability to listen enhanced the informatics community, giving us a fine example of leadership. He was an invaluable colleague and I was honored to call him my friend. Our world was better with Cliff Lynch in it, and is less without him.  I miss him terribly.

(JISC photo from the CNI site)