Dr. Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as Director of Library Automation. Dr. 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.

Dr. Lynch currently serves on the National Digital 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 Age and Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits.

Dr. Lynch has several articles on various topics such as information technologies and higher education, cyberinfrastructure, digital rights management and copyright.