Cliff Lynch


Carl Malamud interviews Cliff Lynch, one of the most thoughtful participants in the race to move libraries and publishers onto electronic publishing platforms. Lynch received his Ph.D. in database systems and is currently the Director of Library Automation for the University of California. Lynch's most amazing accomplishment is the amount of travel he puts in, far outstripping anybody this interviewer has ever met in his ability to attend any and all events where a consensus needs to be forged. His tireless activities have been instrumental in bringing the networking and library communities together.

In this interview, Cliff Lynch discusses online publishing, looking at the issue of SGML as a markup language and examining the question of presentation integrity versus the desire for revisable form documents. Lynch also discusses the Z39.50 protocol, the scaling of very large databases, the democratization of publishing, and the role of the Coalition for Networked Information.

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