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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.