Cliff Lynch: The Invisible Influencer in Information Infrastructure
Cliff Lynch: The Invisible Influencer in Information Infrastructure Herbert Van de Sompel and Michael L. Nelson Note: In the Summer of 2025, a shorter version of this blog post will be published as an essay in portal: Libraries and the Academy , in a Festschrift for Cliff Lynch , who retired from CNI in April 2025 . Abstract The UPS Prototype was a proof-of-concept web portal built in preparation of the Universal Preprint Service Meeting held in October 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The portal provided search functionality for a set of metadata records that had been aggregated from a range of repositories that hosted preprints, working papers, and technical reports. Every search result was overlaid with a dynamically generated SFX-menu that provided a selection of value-adding links for the described scholarly work. The meeting outcome eventually led to the Open Archives Initiative and its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which remains widely used in scholarly communication,...