The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.