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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.