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

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.

All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.

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

People say to me that I'm a role model in technology, but it makes me laugh, because I'm not a technologist, I'm a journalist - that's my background.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

Soon the digital divide will not be between the haves and the have-nots. It will be between the know-hows and the non-know-hows.

I have one major problem with the internet: It's full of liars. There doesn't seem to be any way to answer to people lying about you.