February 2008

The Carolina Digital Library and Archives welcomes the William Blake Archive to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Known throughout the academy for its scholarly rigor and high image presentation standards, the William Blake Archive has become one of the most respected and emulated digital humanities projects. CDLA is proud to provide support and assistance to its editors and staff.

In moving its base of operations to UNC under the auspices of CDLA and the University Library, the Blake Archive joins Documenting the American South, the Russia Beyond Russia Digital Archive, the Thomas Wolfe Collection, the Folkstreams Film Archive and many other wide-ranging collections that combine the power and resources of digital presentation with the highest standards of scholarship in order to make important archival materials available to the international academic community.

—Kirill Fesenko, Director, CDLA

The William Blake Archive was launched in 1995 under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. The following statement about the Archive's relationship with IATH was written by its then-director, John Unsworth. We include it here as an item of historical interest and as a sign of the Blake Archive editors' continuing gratitude for the support and cooperation received during the Archive's time at the Institute.

May 2000

From the Institute's point of view, the William Blake Archive is a highly successful example of networked collaboration in a scholarly research project. This project involves daily communication and cooperation among researchers, programmers, and assistants in four different locations, with only one face-to-face meeting a year. In spite of its geographical dispersion, this project group has worked extremely effectively, over the last several years: evidence of this effectiveness is in the Archive itself, which is a body of work done to the very highest editorial, aesthetic, and technical standards throughout.

In many respects, electronic scholarship in the humanities is still in its infancy: therefore, it is all the more important that we have examples to show that it can be successful--not only in innovating, but also, perhaps more importantly at this stage, in measuring up to traditional scholarly standards. The Blake Archive has done both, and in so doing has shown, definitively, that electronic scholarship is not an oxymoron.

Since the mission of the Institute is to support the research of scholars in the humanities, its technical innovations are driven by the research goals of its Fellows. The Blake project brings the resources of advanced computing to bear on complex problems in art history, including reproduction, cataloguing, and conservation. One of the most important challenges that the project has presented to the Institute has been the need to produce digital reproductions that satisfy researchers for whom color fidelity and image resolution are essential, while still accomodating the file-size restrictions of the Web. Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi have also been the first production users of the Institute's Inote software, a Java application for image annotation which is now a key element in the Blake Archive.

—John Unsworth, Director, IATH (1993-2003)