The road from taking custody of the PWL material to publication has been long and complex.

The Ante-Antiquity Project has partnered with Eneclann to preserve the PWL material since early 2023. Eneclann is an archive, digitisation, and heritage company based in Dublin city. Eneclann began as a Trinity Campus Company in 1998 and is a well known name in the genealogy and heritage space, having previously worked with the television program Who Do You Think You Are, multiple government and heritage organisations, and public figures including Joe Biden, Tom Cruise, and more. 

www.eneclann.ie

As the archivist at Eneclann began to work with the material, it became clear that the project would become larger and more involved than initially believed. In partnership with the Project, Eneclann has now hired one full time and one part time researcher to analyse the content.  Eneclann manages the project and staff managemen, as well as providing a dedicated space for the items to be processed, analysed, digitised, and stored. 

The PWL material arrived in ring binders and bound notebooks, and the book collection in multiple moving boxes. The archives office was chosen to hold items as it has its own entrance, and access to the items can be controlled. The items were all found to be clean, dry, and well preserved. All original items are considered modern, with the oldest original items being dated to 1980. Some of the books are slightly older, some quite fragile.

First, a book catalogue was created. Each book logged and any preservation concerns noted. Some of the older volumes were damaged and required careful handing as well as cotton archive tape to hold them together. Eventually these fragile items should be housed in custom acid and lignin free boxes. None of the books were found to have significant water, mould, or other physical damages. PWL had written in the majority of them – making notes in the margins, commenting on the content, and underlining sections in different pen colours. 

All books were then placed on shelves in our working office, and are used as a resource while working through the material. Each is assigned a location within the catalogue, and returned to its proper shelf after use to ensure none are lost or misplaced. (see Fig.1,3)

The ring binders hold the original PWL material. (see Figs.2, 6) There are approximately 40,000 handwritten pages of material. The majority of pages have information written on both sides. Since the material is so dense and a narrative was not immediately clear, the pages are being catalogued primarily using a tagging system. PWL marked each page with a number in a series. Some of these series lasted days, sometimes weeks and months. This numbering informed the title of each page. Each page was given a new, unique number by the archivist to create a cohesive numbering system. These numbers are sequential and span the entirety of the work. The binders are also processed chronologically, meaning the earliest page is the first page of the earliest binder. Each page is tagged with words, numbers, themes, etc that occur often in the work. The first fifty pages or so will eventually need to be re-tagged, as they guided the tag system. Thus some important tags that were clearly relevant may have been missed. 

Important tags were determined by their frequency and their relations to cosmology, religion, myth, and other cultural and scientific relevance. It was also noted when Greek or Hebrew words and letters were present in the page. The maximum number of tags each page can have is 54. Each page entry in the catalogue has an original location, date, title, and relevant tags. 

In the first few thousand pages, a data aggregation took place to identify the most commonly seen tags. This data aggregation steered the beginning of the further analysis of the material. This work was stopped when it became clear that the work is cyclical, and once the prevailing themes were identified. This information may still be useful in the future, and is held as part of the project in the staff files. 

When it became clear that PWL used Hebrew and Greek on nearly every page, a preliminary exploration into these languages took place. PWL uses Greek mixed with English often, meaning special attention needs to be paid to the letters in each word to ensure the right letter is being identified. 

His Hebrew letters were more difficult to decipher. PWL’s way of writing the Hebrew letters was compared to a modern alphabet, and it was determined that PWL does not use any of the modifiers that modern Hebrew utilises to differentiate sounds. Since our team had little prior knowledge of Hebrew, we contacted the local Chabad. The people at the Chabad were incredibly helpful both in identifying letters as well as determining that PWL uses some cursive or shorthand to write some of the letters. They also verified that PWL was working with Gematria, sometimes using the letters as the numbers they represent in that system, and writing mathematical formulas in letters rather than numbers. A professor at Trinity College Dublin also verified this, with the additional help of identifying that some of the words are actually phrases directly from scripture. An employee of Eneclann at the time who is fluent in Hebrew further verified this. From here, analysis was transferred to another researcher, so the archiving could continue. 

As each page is processed and its tags noted, they are marked with their unique identifying number in pencil. This number matches their unique digital identifier. Pages are digitised in-house by the archivist, ensuring proper handling and digital housing. At the time of writing, over 12,000 pages are digitised, and over 10,000 are uploaded to our Omeka site. Omeka was chosen to host the digital artefacts of this project due to its tagging capabilities, exhibit abilities, and ease of use. At the time of writing, none of the pages are public, but the ability to easily toggle this setting was also a big selling point for choosing Omeka, as well as the ability to create users and change their access abilities. Finally, Omeka is as a third, separate digital storage for the items, in addition to the other in-house and online storage we use to protect these images.

Once each binder has been digitised, the items are rehoused in archival quality folders and boxes (see Figs. 4 and 5). A physical catalogue of the items is available, so originals can be easily located if needed. These folders and boxes are the final housing of the items, and will be moved to the collection’s final storage place at the appropriate time. 

The digital images are what the researchers use to work through the content of the pages in order to further protect the original papers. As the researchers worked though the items, some pages emerged as more relevant or important than others. These pages were uploaded to Transkribus and transcribed using a custom model(see Fig. 7). This process allows the researchers to more easily work with the items, and the transcribed pages and their corresponding images may be uploaded for public view in the future. These pages will have an additional code or tag, allowing them to be easily found in both the catalogue and on Omeka. This is a new process, and the best way to identify these images has not yet been determined. As with the majority of work in this project, trial and error is necessary to find the best process.

While this archive of items is very unique, typical archival practices were easily tweaked to ensure the long term physical and digital preservation of the items, as well as an appropriate search and find system. Catalogues of both the book collection and the handwritten pages are constantly updated, and the physical items are safely stored in proper long-term housing. The PWL archive is large, and its content many layered, but the system used to store and organise the items has proven to be not only appropriate for preservation, but for research needs as well.