The Blake Archive is not a physical repository of Blake's collected works, nor is it a clearinghouse through which users can obtain reproductions of those works. The Archive is not the "official" Blake home page in the sense that other Web sites claim an official status for themselves, nor are the Archive's editors empowered to act as Blake's literary executors.

So what is the Blake Archive and why do we use the term "archive" in the first place?

The William Blake Archive is an online hypermedia environment that allows its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of Blake's work. These reproductions have been prepared according to the highest technical and scholarly standards, with the cooperation of a number of the major museum, library, and private collections.

By eventually incorporating as much of Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible—with both images and texts organized, interlinked, and searchable in ways that only hypermedia systems will allow—the Archive will for the first time give scholars and students access to the major intersections between the illuminated books and Blake's other creative and commercial works. Much more detailed information about the scope of the project, its background, and our plans for the future may be found in the About the Archive section of the site.

Though "archive" is the term we have fallen back on, in fact we envision a unique resource unlike any other currently available for the study of Blake—a hybrid all-in-one edition, catalogue, database, and set of scholarly tools capable of taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by new information technology.