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Here you can find links to databases and other helpful things, such as an article on how to untangle a messed-up skein of yarn.

Databases are an utterly wonderful thing - and, to my neverending delight, there are more and more of them available on the Internet.

On this page, I'm listing the many image, object, and museum databases that I have come across during the years. I hope you will find them helpful.

Some of the databases offer their content under a Creative Commons license or even as Public Domain, meaning that their images are free to use (at least for non-commercial purposes). Good netiquette (and sometimes the licensing terms as well) demand that you give the source of the image; usually the databases provide a permalink to the image, which should be cited together with the database or museum or library name.

Here's my list of image and object or museum databases, in no particular order:

REALonline is mainly a database for artwork, with some objects thrown in for good measure. The site is available in both German and English.

Search the collections at the V&A London, which will yield images of objects. 

(This text originally appeared on my blog.)

In a perfect world, every skein of yarn is a perfectly arranged series of loops, ready to be unwound with no trouble whatsoever.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world, and after going through the rigors of a dyebath or after being mangled by children, cats or other calamities, you might end up with a tangled skein. Maybe even a severely tangled skein.

You have three options now. Option One: Throw that lump of loops into the rubbish bin. Yes, that is a valid option – if you don’t really need that yarn, if you can buy it again, if you don’t have a lot of patience, if you are not really willing to untangle it, if it’s wool and has felted itself together in the tangling process, so that pulling apart the loops will damage the yarn. If it’s one-of-a-kind or it was horrendously expensive, though, you might not want to throw it away. Luckily, there is Option Two: Figure out some way to use the yarn that does not require it to be all in one piece. Draw out as much yarn as possible at one time (or your pre-defined lengths), cut, untangle the knob that forms, repeat until skein is gone and you are left with a number of one-length cutoffs. Take care to wind each cutoff after measuring it and cutting it, or you might face more tangles!

That is not the thing you need? You really want one long length of yarn? Then take a deep breath, go buy some chocolate, put on a kettle for some tea and sit down for some lengthy yarn skein de-tangling. To get an estimation of how long it will take you, make a wild guess. Then multiply the time of your wild guess by two – that’s the pessimistic wild guess. Now multiply that by ten, and you have an estimate. (Seriously, if you are pressed for time, this is not an option. Go buy another bit of yarn. And if you are not patient in the face of tangles, find somebody who likes to untangle yarn and bribe that person.)

The German Wörterbuchnetz gives you access to a number of German dictionaries, including the Grimm'sches Wörterbuch and the Middle High German Word Database (MHDBDB is the German acronym) plus a few encyclopaedias.

The Rechtswörterbuch has laws and regulations cited in there which also include medieval texts, and you can search for the names of jobs, for instance.

The Encyclopaedia of Needlework by Therèse de Dillmont was published in the late 19th century and teaches all kinds of needlework, from basic sewing stitches to lace embroidery to netting and tatting. 

A very early Italian pattern book is freely available on the net: Alessandro Paganino's book "Il Burato". The book was published in 1518 and contains lots of patterns, plus the famous picture on how to transfer patterns to the fabric. 

On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics - which includes articles, books and illustration not only about weaving, but about a large number of topics, down to spinning (though mostly modern spinning on machines), lace, nets, and needlework. The site had its last update back in 2016, but the articles are still available.

A Faksimile and Transcript of "Nature Unbowelled", a 17th century book with recipes for loopbraided laces.

Here is a textiles, garments, and dye glossary. It's an ongoing project for terms from the 17th century. 

The Troubadour Melodies Database does not really fit in here, but I did not want to leave it out completely. It is based on Katie Chapman's dissertation, and you can search the database with over 300 melodies from medieval manuscripts, and even compare melodies from different authors and different sources.

 

If you are researching sources, be it written or image sources, on the internet or in real physical publications, you will have run into the how-to-find-stuff problem: Some things are very easy to find, as they are quite prominent. So everybody finds them, and everybody knows them.

Then, of course, these things get cited, and linked to, and re-published, which makes them even easier to find. The books less looked at, the sites less often linked to? Not so visible. Or, as digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org puts it:

Finding digitized medieval manuscripts is not an easy task: the most prominent libraries are easily found and pinpointed on the maps. Problems arise for all the other digitized libraries that are not discoverable through search engines for many reasons (the website is not optimized or not accessible by crawlers and doesn't appear on web searches, the library is in a language different from English only, or, more in general, the website is difficult to access due to poor web design).

If you're reading research papers now and then (or frequently, of course), you will probably have stumbled across The Paywall more often than you'd like. Murphy's rules for reading scholarly work definitely includes one that says "The article that sounds most interesting will be inaccessible due to some reason, preferably a paywall."

So. You'd like to read something, but the publisher would like to have half an arm, or maybe quarter of a leg for access to the volume, issue, or article? There's a few ways to get the article of interest without paying yourself. If you have a library card for a Uni library (you usually can get those without much fuss for the country you live in), and the library is within reach and has online access to the journal (which you can usually find out via their database) - there you go, you can access and download the article from a library computer. Bring your own USB stick, or mail it to yourself.

If that's not the case, there's networks like academia.edu and researchgate.net. Both are free to join, and they offer the possibility to network with researchers, follow them (so you get to see if they add something new) and read their papers. Authors upload pdf copies of their work; it's still legal, as the copies are not freely available, but within a closed group. You can also request a paper if it's not uploaded yet, and hope the person in question isn't as slow as I am with adding new things.

unpaywall.org is a database with free versions of paywalled articles. There are several ways to use the database for your research, such as integration in Zotero, but the easiest one I have found is to use Chrome with the unpaywall extension. When you are on a page with a doi, you can then hopefully see a green open padlock on the right side of your screen - click that, and you are taken to the place with the free version of the article. 

The Directory of Open Access Journals is just what the name implies - you can search for both journals and indexed articles. There is limited content available regarding medieval textiles, but there is some, from journals in a number of languages.

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