Zitat des Tages von Robert Darnton:
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 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.
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.
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.
People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help.
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.
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.
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.
When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.
Texts are always in flux.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
