In this article, Brian L. Hawkins, President of EDUCAUSE, interviews Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and the recipient of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Award for Leadership in Public Policy and Practice, about, among other things, the current CNI initiatives, digital assets preservation, e-science, institutional repositories, Google, and future challenges for networked information technology. Lynch states that "informatics support has some elements of IT knowledge, some elements of library and information science expertise, and some elements of data management skills.... This calls for a team approach including both libraries and IT organizations but also going beyond both at some level." (Part 2 of this interview appears in the May/June 2006 issue of EDUCAUSE Review.)