Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Nifty Dissertation Find

I just learned from one of the mailing lists I'm on that the following dissertation has just been made available by the British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOs) for free download:

Fitzgerald, Maria Amelia. Textile Production in Prehistoric and Early Medieval Ireland. (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2000).

To download from EThOs, you need to register for a login account, but doing so is free and doesn't require a school affiliation (as best I recall). They charge varying amounts to account holders for most of the theses they have, but there are a few, like Ms. Fitzgerald's work, that they will permit account holders to download for free, in a zip file, provided the requester has an account and agrees to the terms and conditions (which include honoring the relevant copyright laws).

So now I have a multi-volume work on early Irish textile production on my machine. It appears to incorporate a descriptive listing of just about all, if not all, textile tools found in Ireland that date to the period addressed by Ms. Fitzgerald. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

EDIT: You can reach the EThOs home page from this link.

SECOND EDIT: This page will explain how to open a zip file so that you can read it, no matter whether your computer uses Windows, Mac, or Linux as an operating system.

2 comments:

  1. Just downloaded it too! What a resource, I've just started doing research into Irish textile history (the lack of it, mostly!, and am thrilled with such an find.

    Thanks for the tips on the zip stuff!

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  2. You're welcome.

    My home machine runs Linux, and I had never known how to open a zip file--until now. The last thing I wanted was for my advice to simply result in frustrated researchers!

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