"Work that fails to enter a canon—literary, historical, or otherwise—tends to languish on the dustier..."

“Work that fails to enter a canon—literary, historical, or otherwise—tends to languish on the dustier shelves of college libraries. Digitization allows a new generation of scholars to look at them with fresh regard. This represents a significant change in the way we think about scholarship. Google Books is a kind of Victorian portal that takes me into a mare magnum of out-of-print authors, many of whom helped launch disciplines. Or who wrote essays, novels, and histories that did not transcend their time. Or who anonymously produced the paperwork of emerging bureaucracies, organizations, and businesses that, because printed, has been scanned and, because scanned, is now available.” - Professor Paula Findlen, a historian at Stanford, basically saying everything I’ve ever hoped would be true about digitization and research in her column,"How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century" in The Chronicle of Higher Education.