CNI Press Release	FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 1997 CONTACT: Joan K. Lippincott 202.296.5098 joan@cni.org CNI Appoints Clifford Lynch as New Executive Director WASHINGTON, DC - The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) announced today that Clifford A. Lynch will become the Coalition's new Executive Director beginning in July 1997. Lynch, who is currently the Director of Library Automation at the University of California Office of the President, succeeds Paul Evan Peters, CNI's founder and Executive Director, who died suddenly in November 1996.           "Cliff is uniquely gifted to lead the Coalition," said Duane Webster, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries. "His intimate and long-standing relationship with CNI provides the background to help us all move the Coalition smoothly into the new environment we face."             Robert C. Heterick, Jr., Educom President concurred, "Cliff Lynch is well known to, and much respected by, many members of the Educom community.  His scholarly research in the general subject area of networked information is truly remarkable and often quoted." Heterick added, "His leadership of the Melvyl effort at the University of California was groundbreaking for scholars not only at the University of California but all across this nation and the world.  I couldn't be more pleased to find that he has accepted our challenge to provide leadership for the very important work of the Coalition for Networked Information."           Jane Ryland, CAUSE President, offered similar remarks, "I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with Clifford for years, well before we conceived of the concept of CNI. I'm truly delighted that we'll now have even more of his prodigious talents and energies working to help create a networked information environment for the 21st century."           Lynch has been at the University of California since 1979 where he oversees university-wide library automation and internetworking activities. M. Stuart Lynn, Associate Vice President of Information Resources and Communications at the University of California commented regarding the announcement: "Whereas I and his many colleagues and friends at the University are sorry to see him leave after so many years of extraordinary service, we are delighted for him and for CNI as he takes on this new challenge in an important national policy position. UC  - as a founding member of CNI - and I  personally as a member of the CNI Steering Committee - are pleased that CNI will be moving forward under Cliff's inspirational leadership."           Internationally known for his development of Melvyl, an information system which serves all of the campuses of the University of California, Lynch has played a key role in the development of information standards. Especially noteworthy is his work on Z39.50, which addresses the need for interoperability among information retrieval systems.           He has served on the Board of Directors of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and currently is a member of NISO's Standards Development Committee, and is also active within the Internet Engineering Task Force. Lynch, who is the immediate past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has received several awards recognizing his contributions, including the American Library Association's LITA/Gaylord award, an ASIS Dissertation Award, and the American Society for Engineering Education's Homer Bernhardt Award.           A prolific author, Lynch recently wrote an article that appears in the March 1997 issue of Scientific American. He has been involved in a wide range of national initiatives in areas ranging from preservation of electronic information to research programs for digital libraries. He has also taught at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley for a number of years, and played an active role in the committee that defined the program for the new school.           Lynch holds a Bachelors of Arts in Mathematics and Computer Science from Columbia College; a Master of Sciences in Computer Science from the Columbia University School of Engineering; and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.           Regarding his appointment as CNI's Executive Director, Lynch said "It's a great honor to be able to build on the work that my friend and colleague Paul Peters has done on behalf of our whole community, and to be able to lead CNI into the 21st century. My belief is that CNI is the most important program that we have to chart the course for the development and exploitation of the possibilities of networked information to serve scholarship. As a community, we face enormous but often confusing opportunities that can be addressed only by working together on a national and international basis, and I will work to ensure that CNI continues to be a powerful vehicle for sorting through the confusion, fostering dialog, and engaging the opportunities before us."           CNI is an organization for institutions concerned with realizing the promise of high performance networks and computers for the advancement of scholarly communication and publishing and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. The Coalition was formed in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and Educom. The Coalition pursues its mission with the guidance of a nine member steering committee and the aid of a 200 member task force made up of higher education institutions, publishers, network service providers, computer hardware, software, and systems companies, library networks and organizations, and public and state libraries.           CNI is an organization to advance the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. The Coalition was formed in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and Educom.
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