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