The British Library-Google tie-up, thousands of texts available. But nothing beats the thrill of an original document

It was in 1907, immured in a cave on the Silk Road in Dunhuang, northwest China, where he had been discovered untouched for 900 years. The Diamond Sutra, from the "from the 13th of the fourth moon of the ninth year Xiatong" or 868AD, is a sacred text of the Buddhist faith and one of the hidden treasures of the British Library. Or not so hidden as it will now be downloaded as a smartphone app.

The ubiquity of the story has taken another major step forward with the BL-Google tie-up set of about 250,000 books online taken. An amazing variety of texts from 1700 to 1870, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the early days of the empire and the industrial revolution that will soon be accessible via Google Book Search. From Mumbai coffee shop or Australian Air Terminal, we will all be in a position of such wonders as George-Louis Leclerc 's 1775 treatise, The Natural History of the hippopotamus, hippopotamus or mull.

The Google partnership signals an undeniable step forward for science. For the arrival of the search engines have revolutionized our ability to sift through and to surf past transformed. What would have once required days trawling through an index, the hunt for a footnote or looking for a misplaced book from the library can now be done in an instant. Do you want to find a clue from Marx to Gladstone? No problem www.marxists.org . You want the estate of Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire left side? The online Dictionary of National Biography has the answer.

This techno-enthusiasm should not be too much of a surprise. For all its musty reputation, the historians are very keen on short cuts for the interpretation of the past. In the 1970s, the "Econometrics" IBM mainframes embraced as a way to crunch data on its development. In the 1980s, it was all about placing the Domesday Book on CD-ROMS. Now a museum experience is complete without an accompanying app, while GPS has transformed battlefield studies. Historians have for the blog, a perfect vehicle for the lifeblood of gossip, envy, malice, and "\ constructive criticism" that the story is always dropped.

But when everything is loaded down, the truth can be lost in history. Why sit in an archive browsing impenetrable prose, where you can sip Frappucino while to scroll down Edmund Burke documents?

But it is only with MS in the hand, that the true meaning of the text is clear: its rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the argument or cold logic of the matter. Then there is the serendipity, the scholar 's eternal hope, something that his eye. Maybe another document is used in the same game, maybe a few marginal notes or even leaf with another text inserted as a bookmark. There is nothing more exciting than lifting the frayed cord to open the envelope and leafing through a first edition in anticipation of unexpected discoveries. None of this is possible on an iPad.

In a lecture, Peter Hennessy recently \ the historian's craft as related to the cryogenic trade - Warming up the frozen history of the archive until he began to speak. Such a delicate procedure is usually best done by hand.