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

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

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

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.

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.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

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