"The Future of Special and Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age"
Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
February 24, 2010

In a lecture geared for Librarians, Lynch will discuss how digital technology is changing the way in which special and distinctive collections are acquired, organized, used, curated and preserved, and what this implies for the future of research libraries, both in their connection to the scholarly world and to the broader society. For an extended version of talk go to Associated Research Libraries' Research Library Issue, December 2009: http://publications.arl.org/pdfdownload/ps047/view

Clifford Lynch has been the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in Washington, DC since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. Lynch serves on the National Digital Preservation Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress, Microsoft's Technical Computing Science Advisory Board, the board of the New Media Consortium, and the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access; he was a member of the National Research Council committees that published The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure and Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits.