Robert Darnton

“People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.”

“People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help.”

“I want to continue to strengthen Harvard's fabulous collections in old printed material, but at the same time, I want to help Harvard move into the world of digitized information.”

“I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.”

“Texts are always in flux.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals.”

“While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”

“Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.”

“The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak.”

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

“I believe we should celebrate new possibilities of combining the printed codex with electronic technology... The information ecology is getting richer, not thinner.”

“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.”

“We need librarians who can handle this tremendous jumble of information that is in cyberspace.”

“We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology.”

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

“Digital data are more fragile than printed material.”