Clifford A. Lynch, adjunct professor in the School of Information and executive director of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), will serve as a keynote speaker at the iConference 2016, an annual, international gathering that pushes the boundaries of information studies and creates new technological and conceptual configurations. Lynch will join director and producer Robin Hauser Reynolds and Drexel University executive vice president and provost M. Brian Blake to serve as the third keynote speaker at the conference.
The conference, which will take place in historic Philadelphia from Mar. 20-23, 2016, is being hosted by Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI). The event will bring together more than 400 leading researchers and innovators from academia and industry under the theme of “Partnership with Society” to examine the dynamic, evolving role of information science and today’s iSchool movement, and the benefits to society.
“It is an honor to have Cliff as a keynote for iConference 2016,” said Jane Greenberg, iConference 2016 co-chair and Drexel University Alice B. Kroeger Professor. “Cliff is among the most profound thought leaders of the information fields, and has forged a path for how information professionals can address grand challenges with digital information, while inspiring our leadership.”
Lynch’s keynote, titled “Stewardship as a Systematic Future Research Initiative in Schools of Information,” will discuss the importance of recognizing the policies and practices surrounding stewardship as a field of scholarly inquiry and as an emerging discipline. Lynch believes that intellectual inquiry regarding stewardship “falls squarely within the remit of iSchools and draws upon a very wide range of disciplines including history, information management, economics of information, information assurance and security, digital preservation, law, political science, and library, museum and archival practices.”
In his talk, Lynch will highlight the key research questions that a discipline like stewardship must engage and explore. These questions will address legal and public policy issues surrounding archiving and stewardship; seek to understand stewardship institutions and their roles, collaboration, succession and sustainability; and discuss the dynamics of stewardship and stewardship transitions and address why stewardship failures occur, among other questions.
Since 1997, Lynch has led the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) – an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. CNI, a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life. CNI’s wide-ranging agenda includes work in digital preservation, data intensive scholarship, teaching, learning and technology, and infrastructure and standards development.
Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California (UC) Office of the President, the last ten as director of UC’s Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is both a past president and recipient of the Award of Merit 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.
In 2011 he was appointed co-chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI); he serves on numerous advisory boards and visiting committees. His work has been recognized by the American Library Association’s Lippincott Award, the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice, and the American Society for Engineering Education’s Homer Bernhardt Award.
To learn more about the iConference 2016 and its keynote speakers, please visit http://ischools.org/the-iconference/program/keynote-speakers.
Clifford Lynch photo courtesy of Jisc.
