I was properly busy yesterday and added more pictures to the shop as well as a few new items. Among them, brand-spanking-new: six-holed weaving tablets (made of parchment) and very variable slate frames.

You can check out the new goodies here - and I hope you like them!

I have finally updated the homepage at www.pallia.net - and for those of you in Germany (or at least reading German) who are interested in getting all the news from pallia, you can now sign up to a newsletter that will make sure you get all the interesting announcements.

Since most of my news-announcing is done via this blog, and this blog is English, the Germans who are not really at home with a foreign language always got to be a little disadvantaged. And while I will go on with this blog as usual, there's now a German language way to get the updates - including those not too interesting for an international audience.

Signing up is, of course, easy: Just go to www.pallia.net, and you can sign up right on the front page of the (German language) site. The newsletter will be used to announce workshop dates and the occasional larger shop update or places and dates where you can find me (and the market stall, probably).

I stumbled across this link a few days ago:

archaeologywordsmith is a page with some kind of archaeology dictionary - so if you ever wanted to read about trowels, ditches, mottes and a gazillion other things, you can do that there. Plus there's a "learn a word" feature when you open or reload the page.

Have fun!

If you are interested in medieval material culture, you will surely have heard about the IMAREAL - an Austrian institute that did a lot of research and made a lot of publications about that topic. The IMAREAL also includes several helpful databases, among them the picture database REAL online - which you probably also know. (If not, you should. It's huge and immensely helpful.)

All this institute is part of a larger organisation, the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austrian Academy of Sciences). This is a rather large Academy - in fact it's the largest non-university establishment for research in Austria - and it's an important employer for scientists in social and historical fields as well. 905 people* including admin staff work there, and I have at least two friends who are employed by them.

However, this is about to change. There has been a "Performance Agreement" (that never bodes well, does it?) between the ÖAW and the Ministry for Science and Research in Austria, signed on November 4.
This agreement paves the way for a large budget reduction and, consequently, for the loss or closure of many demonstrably excellent and internationally acclaimed research organisations. With these, up to 300 full-time staff members may have to go between 2012 and 2014.

That's about one third of employees! Such drastic employee cuts are unprecedented in Austrian
history since 1945.  The current economic climate does not serve to justify this severity, and cuts on this scale have not been made in any other areas.
Since third-party funding totaling approx. 22 Mio. Euro was acquired by employees, who now stand to lose their jobs, further negative impacts are foreseeable.  This amounts to a sustainable destruction of knowledge and infrastructure. 

There is a petition online to protest against these budget cuts and the subsequent loss of jobs. The petition page linked is in German, but there is a full English translation available on the page as well, with a translation of the field names and confirmation email you will get (link opens .pdf file). It is even possible to sign anonymously, if you do not wish your name to appear. If you want to go directly to the signing page, just click the red button below.




Please help by signing and passing on the information about this petition - it will only run for 54 more days. If everyone who uses the REAL online database signs, they might be in for a surprise...

* This may not sound much if you have large businesses at the back of your mind - but for social or historical sciences, it's oodles.

For those who have not found out about it yet, it is Open Access week this week!

Open Access is a model of publishing that aims to remove the paywall barrier to research knowledge - by granting open access to results. Now, if you've ever thought about getting an article via a portal such as ingentaconnect and were asked to pay, say, 45 USD for a 5-page paper where you don't even know if it will really hold that vital information, you will know about what "paywall barrier" means.

Open Access has its pros and cons, as every system has. But this week and for me, it has only pros - since the portal I just mentioned hosts journals by Maney Publishing house, and that house takes part in OA Week. You can find 22 archaeological journals on their page, and all the papers are free for you to read - no paying, no registration, no nothing - until November 4.

Also taking part, but only until October 30, is Internet Archaeology.

And finally, there's a long list of Open Access journals in archaeology on Doug's Archaeology blog.

And if this blog post is not going to steal at least half an hour from your life, I don't know what will...

Recently, Gina of Gina-B Silkworks posted this really helpful instruction on how to unwind a (small) skein of yarn with no reel and no helper - and no tangles.

And today, while preparing for my London visit, I stumbled across the UK Textile Society. There's an event page as well as a museum list on their site, and they have a journal that does look interesting as well.

And finally, the posters from last NESAT have been put online, so you can download them and have a look. It is really worth it!

... a textile conservator?

Then this webpage might be interesting for you - it lists possibilities to learn textile conservation, plus quite a few other things (like where you can find a conservator in the US if you need one). The site includes a blog as well as a bunch of nice "conservators at work" pictures.

At work is precisely what I should be at now, too - I cannot believe how those to-do lists grow when left unattended for the shortest while!