The editors of the Blake Archive are pleased to announce that copies F, H, and O of The Book of Thel and copies a, C, and J of Visions of the Daughters of Albion are now publicly accessible. The images are linked to enlargements and to transcriptions edited to correspond to the particular copy; plates are displayed in the order they appear in the copy and are identified by that order, as well as by their Bentley, Erdman, and Keynes plate numbers.

The source of the digital images are new 4x5 color transparencies, which were color corrected against the originals. They were scaled to the size of the originals and scanned in 24-bit color at 300dpi. The resulting digital images, which were color corrected against the transparencies, are displayed as jpeg images, at 100dpi and at 300dpi. The former image will be displayed larger or smaller than the original depending on your monitor's resolution. In the near future, though, using a program being developed by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities , you will be able to receive these images resized on the fly according to your monitor's resolution.

We will continue to make copies of illuminated books accessible once we have scanned and color corrected the images and edited the texts. In the next few months, we will display The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy D, Urizen copy G, Song of Los copy B, Europe copies B and E, and America copy E. We will also post a general bibliography on Blake and select bibliographies for each of these books, as well as Erdman's edition of Blake's poetry and prose. Users will thus be able to browse the Archive, downloading images and texts (for private use only). When the search engine is operational, they will also be able to search the Archive for words, visual motifs, or bibliographical information, because we are also encoding all texts, plates, and images in Standard General Markup Language (see Plan of the Archive).

We presently have over 1200 transparencies of a projected 3000 for the Archive. With the entire Rosenwald Collection of illuminated books and the Essick Collection of prints, as well as works from the Glasgow University Library and the New York Public Library, we have at least one copy of every illuminated book, major series of prints (Book of Job, Dante illustrations, Night Thoughts, etc.), and commercial engraving. We will be adding paintings and manuscripts as we add other important collections to the Archive. Scanning, editing, and encoding all of these images will keep the site under construction for the next few years.

Users can visit this page for future updates about our progress and about future developments at the Institute that affect the Archive, such as INOTE (written in the programming language Java), a tool that makes it possible for users to search, enlarge, compare, and annotate images.

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