The members of the selection committee were A. R. Braunmuller (Univ. of California, Los Angeles); Timothy Brennan (Univ. of Minnesota); and Leah S. Marcus (Vanderbilt Univ.), chair. The committee's citation for the winning edition reads:
The William Blake Archive is a dazzling combination of hypertextually organized texts, bibliographical and historical commentaries, and beautifully reproduced visual images, including thousands of plates of Blake drawings, watercolors, and manuscripts. In the past the prize has been awarded to single volumes in a multivolume series. This year's prize, similarly, is awarded to major scholarly additions to the archive published in 2001 or 2002, including Blake's first group of twenty-one watercolors illustrating the book of Job and three copies of The [First] Book of Urizen. If, as has been frequently suggested, the future of editorial scholarship lies in online editions, the William Blake Archive has set a high mark for future editorial practice through its clarity, user-friendliness, beauty, and erudition.