“The primary goal of the Essential Vermeer website is to harness the extraordinary potential of the internet to provide a comprehensive and organic presentation of Vermeer’s art, life, and cultural milieu. Complex art historical issues are made accessible to casual art lovers while retaining their relevance for scholars and experts. News of Vermeer-related exhibitions, publications, and multimedia events are reported in real time.”

See also The William Blake Archive: “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 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 and now among the editors and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries and ITS Research Computing, 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…The Archive also provides robust search functionality, enhanced by the editors’ controlled vocabulary and detailed image descriptions, as well as a virtual lightbox and an Application Programming Interface—all to facilitate various approaches to the scholarly study of Blake’s materials. Finally, users of the Archive can enjoy learning more about Blake in its digital exhibition wing—see, again, the main menu—which hosts curated exhibitions of selected works or special topics dealing with Blake’s oeuvre.”