Scholar armchair adventurers?

The title of one of Scott's recent posts makes me wonder what will happen to the image of the scholar as lonely (male) laborer in the field of dusty texts, toiling away in the reading room of some far-distant research library.   Depending on the field, this image may well persist; as Scott and his commenters note, for example, anyone specializing in a manuscript-heavy line of work will still need to travel to far-away shores (and libraries) in order to get their work done.  (One might add that bibliographers and historians of the book will be in similar straits, since digital copies still conceal important evidence.)   But, despite my ongoing griping about Google Books*, its search function does drastically reduce the amount of time I need to spend sifting through certain kinds of materials, like periodicals.  Not entirely--Google usually digitizes only scattered volumes of nineteenth-century periodicals, not full runs, and sometimes confines results to the fearsome snippet view--but just enough to free up my time to follow up other project-related leads.   (Ironically, as with so many other "time-saving" devices, this may increase the amount of time we spend working!)

And for an academic, time is $.  The lower a scholar is down the college food chain, the harder it is to scrape up the cash to fly across the Atlantic  or anywhere else, with adjuncts and graduate students having a terrible time of it.  (Adjuncts more than graduate students, because the latter may have greater institutional support for travel.)  Digitization projects like GoogleBooks and Archive.org thus enable more scholars to pursue their work by reducing/eliminating the cashflow problem**; I can read rare Victorian Catholic novels from my somewhat tattered office chair, without wondering where I'm going to find the funds to get to the Bodleian.  Part of me keeps hinting, though, that I really should be reading this book in the Bodleian...because how can it be "work" if I'm not physically present at the library, transcribing passages on my netbook from dawn to dusk?***      This is a totally illogical reaction, of course--not least because most research, especially on non-canonical authors and texts, still requires a considerable outlay on figurative shoe leather.  But the "monastic" or ascetic narrative of scholarship, if you like, requires the scholar to spend years and years gathering data from long-unread tomes.  Now, in some cases, we can do the gathering in less than a minute.  How will this change the stories we tell about scholarly identity and practice?        

*--Somewhat reduced as of late--while it could be just an instance of confirmation bias, the quality of the scans seems to have improved.      
**--As long, of course, as they remain free.
***--Which reminds me that digitized books save us all the hassle of finding typos in our notes.  Unless there are typos in the digital copy.