From the website:
Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings, and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that would have astonished his contemporaries. Today both his poetry and visual art in several media are admired by a global audience. In the broadest terms, the William Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held.
A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees.
Through intensive collaboration, initially between the editors and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and now between the editors and the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA), the Archive has been able to achieve exceptionally high standards of site construction, digital representation, and electronic editing that are, we believe, models of their kind. Advanced principles of design allow the Blake Archive to integrate editions, catalogues, databases, and scholarly tools into one electronic archival resource. We supply reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided. To accomplish this with equally high standards, we publish works in Standard Mode and Preview Mode. For fully published works in the Archive, we supply a wealth of contextual information, which includes full and accurate bibliographical details and meticulous descriptions of the content of each image. Works published in our Preview Mode lack descriptions of Blake's pictorial designs and image-search capabilities but offer all the other features of fully published works. Finally, users of the Archive can attain a new degree of access to these works through the combination of powerful text-searching and (for the first time in any medium) advanced image-searching tools that are made possible by the editors' controlled vocabulary, detailed image descriptions, and innovative software, including two custom-designed Java applets. Although we have designed the Archive to serve scholars and the general public within the limits of existing systems, we have built in considerable allowance for future improvements in hardware and software.