Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

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.

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.

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.

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.