Among the colleagues during the twenty years I worked at the British Library who profoundly influenced me was the historian of the English language, bibliographer and librarian, Robin Alston (1933–2011). Robin's great scholarly achievement was his twenty-volume Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, but the range of his achievements and interests stretched far beyond this. While he was a lecturer at the University of Leeds, he founded Scolar Press to provide cheap facsimiles of historical and literary texts for his students. As editor- in-chief of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, which afterwards became the English Short Title Catalogue or ESTC, Robin profoundly influenced the way in which we use printed books from the hand press period. Robin's insistence that this new catalogue should be machine readable and his energy in driving forward the ESTC laid the foundations of such current digital resources as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth- Century Collections Online. Robin was one of the pioneers who shaped the modern digital research environment for humanities scholars.

In 1990, Robin was appointed Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College London, and he gave his inaugural lecture at UCL, entitled ‘The Battle of the Books’, on 16 February 1993. I attended, with many others from the British Library. The atmosphere was electric.

Robin was known as a charismatic, entertaining and thought-provoking lecturer who provided remarkable insights into current and future developments. He did not fail on this occasion. Robin took his starting point Jonathan Swift's satire, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St James's Library, appended to the Tale of a Tub (1704). Swift imagined the books in the Royal Library joining in the conflict between those who revered classical learning and those who stressed the need for up-to-date modern learning. Swift described solitary volumes of classical learning being threatened by the massed ranks of thousands of modern books.