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Once upon a time, only those with access to certain institutions would have been able to read the great works of scholarship, only those with great wealth would have been able to afford having beautiful images for their devotion, only those with great staffs of clerks would have been able to manage large accounts of data, only those with the right social contacts would have even heard of most books.

And then, someone invented a marvelous engine for multiplying books and images and disseminating them inexpensively—and a new world of scholarship, art, commerce, and social networking was born.

No, I am not talking about the printing press.

Printing presses at the Plantin-Moretus House, Antwerp

I was in college when Apple released the Apple Macintosh personal computer in 1984. My first desktop was a Macintosh 512k purchased that same year through a special offer Apple made to students at my university. I remember one of my professors carrying a 3 1/2 floppy disk around in her backpack and marveling how it could hold all of her current writing projects. It seemed magic at the time. Little did we know!

Personal computers were a step up from typewriters, but in those early days, that was about all they could do. We still had to go to the library if we wanted to get a book. Our professors would have to make photocopies of anything they wanted to place on reserve, which we could only consult in the reserve reading room. If we wanted a copy of a text, we would have to photocopy it ourselves. And if we wanted to find a book, we would have to consult the card catalog.

A decade later, by the time I was finishing graduate school, everything had changed.

Libraries made databases of their catalogs, which you could consult simply by going to one of the computer terminals in the card catalog room. Reference works were available on CD-ROMs, likewise available in the card catalog room. No more running around pulling out drawer after drawer from the catalog cabinets, fingering through the cards till you found the one you needed, trying to balance your notebook on your knee while making a note of the call number. You could just sit at a desktop and find every call number that you needed at the stroke of key. Of course, at that time, you still had to get up from the desk and go find the book in the stacks. And only those with library privileges could get into the stacks, never mind borrow the books.

A decade later, by the time I was tenured at the University of Chicago, everything had changed.

Libraries began making digital copies of their books, starting with their most precious possessions. Whole reference series were scanned and made available online. Scholars began working on databases of sources, interactive maps, dictionaries, sourcebooks for teaching—all tools made possible by the introduction of the internet. No longer did you have to go to the library to read Migne’s Patrologia Latina. You just needed an internet connection and access to a university library’s subscription. Searches for information that had previously taken days now took seconds. With a research assistant to make photocopies for me, I never had to leave my desk.

A decade later, by the time I was working on my second big book, everything had changed.

Apple introduced the iPad in April 2010. I had one by June. By December 2010, Google Books launched Google eBooks for reading the scans that it had been making of books published since the beginning of publishing. That same year (or thereabouts), my university library introduced a Scan and Deliver service for making pdfs from the books in our collection. Whereas researching my dissertation involved running up and down the stairs in library after library to fetch things from the stacks, by the time I was working on my second big book, all I needed was an internet connection and my iPad, and I would have access to the libraries of the entire world—not to mention access to scans of the manuscripts of the books that the printing press supplanted.

My Google eBooks

Medievalists regularly report at our annual professional conferences on the ways in which digital media are transforming our work as scholars. With the internet came not only new scholarly tools, but new platforms for sharing our scholarship—including blogs like Fencing Bear at Prayer (although Fencing Bear is my public, not professional avatar)—not to mention the possibility of putting not just text and images, but videos online. We are living through a revolution in communications technology on a scale that has happened only twice before in human history, first with the invention of writing, second with the invention of the printing press.

No wonder it sometimes feels as if we have sailed off the edge of the world!

Here be a few navigation tips for where to find the best dragons.

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