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.

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

Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.