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 peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

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

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

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

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.