I got asked in a previous post about browser extensions and other resources that simplify the process of getting access to academic research articles and ebooks — either subscription (paid) resources that your organisation has paid to make freely available to its students/employees, or Open Access resources that are available without any paywall to everyone. Since I am a librarian, and the librarian urge to help is strong, I thought this might be of value to others as well.

The resources I'm mentioning don't give you any additional access to previously unavailable material, but what they all do is simplify the process of accessing Open Access (i.e. freely available to everyone, regardless of institutional subscription) and subscription (things that are free for you to read because your university/organisation has paid the publisher to enable you to read them) material. They tell your device/browser that you have a login for a specific institution, and minimise the number of clicks, logins, or 'search for your institution through Shibboleth' steps between you and the full-text PDF.

NB: if you have logins for more than one institution, I would recommend that you use one per browser, as otherwise the two institutional logins interfere with one another. For example, I have two different institutional logins, so I use one in Firefox and the other one in Chrome on my work laptop. This applies to all the resources I'm listing below.

All will require a single installation per device and per browser, and once they're installed, they remain on that browser forever, although if you move on from your institution, they'll obviously stop working.

The first is Library Links through Google Scholar: Navigate to Google Scholar, and go to the settings tab. Then navigate to Library Links. If nothing is currently set up, you'll just see a tickbox for Open WorldCat - Library Search. Type the name of your university/organisation into the search box, and when you see its name appear under the search box, tick its tickbox. Once this is done, whenever you search Google Scholar, you will see direct 'library links' next to each result, and when you click them, it should take you straight to the full text PDF, unless your organisation does not subscribe to that journal.


LibKey Nomad and Lean Library tell your browser that you have institutional access to subscription full text articles. Whenever you're viewing something (e.g. an academic journal on a publisher website, or a list of journal articles on an academic database), they cause an additional little button or popup to appear, directing you straight to the PDF if it's available, or telling you that there's no access if your organisation doesn't subscribe. At my institution, the Lean Library popup also directs you straight to the option to request the article via interlibrary loan if no full text is available, and this may also be the case more widely. Both the links above will take you directly to webpages enabling you to add these extensions to your chosen browsers — although I can't guarantee they're compatible with every browser. You'll be asked to search for and select your institution, then login with your institutional login as part of the install process, but once it's set up, you won't be asked for this again.

NB: In my experience, being logged in to Google accounts in your browser when trying to set up these extensions can cause problems. I'd recommend logging out of Gmail or similar Google accounts while installing, and logging back in afterwards.

The above resources only work if you are a member of an organisation (usually a university, although some public service employers such as the NHS in the UK may also have similar institutional logins) that these resources recognise, and which pays for subscription access to academic research publications. Some universities also provide institutional logins for alumni, so you may find this works even if you have graduated — it's worth at least testing.

However, the UnPaywall browser extension works in a similar way, without any institutional affiliation required. This flags up open access versions of whatever papers you're looking at, if such versions exist, and simplifies the process to link you up with them. Totally free and legitimate — it works with data from Open Alex.

It's been another gradually building busy week at work, and another cosy autumnal weekend at home. I've spent this morning at the pool (the lane to myself again for 38 out of 40 laps — I feel extremely fortunate), and now I've paused to take in the absolutely glorious sunlight flooding in through the front windows and catching the leaves on the hedgerow over the road in notes of gold and amber. All in all, perfect.

This past week, I've taught an induction and searching skills class to a group of 40 NHS doctors who are spending the year undertaking research alongside their clinical work, I've met individually with three stressed out students, and I delivered two inductions to two separate cohorts of 25-ish MPhil students. (Amusingly, in the latter of these two inductions, I noticed the two academic course leads — who had sat in to watch me teach — assiduously taking notes. I love it when the existence of the 'library links' institutional login function in Google Scholar settings, browser extensions such as Lean Library or LibKey Nomad which tell your browser you have institutional access to journal articles, and/or the fact that free interlibrary loans are a thing is brand new information to senior academics who've been working at the university for decades!)*

On top of all of that, I've signed up for a year long professional development course offered to staff at the university, and had the first class for that on Thursday. It was fun to meet all the other participants, and in a really nice setting — I think the whole thing will go well, although it does involve my nemesis: long-term group projects. One of the other participants immediately wanted to compliment me on my jumper ('Is that Donegal wool?' 'I ... I think so?').

This weekend is one of the points in the year in which our town somewhat resembles an episode of Gilmore Girls: an apple/harvest fair on the grounds surrounding the cathedral, filled with stalls selling craft, food (both food truck stuff to eat there, and things to take home like fudge, cheese, preserves etc) and drink. Most of it has an apple theme (spiced apple cider fudge and so on), and the wider town gets into the swing of things with fringe apple-related stuff as well (the bakery was selling apple pies and apple crumble danishes, our former hiking group friend who sells sourdough bread out of his house was selling apple bread, etc). Matthias and I were there for a couple of hours yesterday, eating food truck food, drinking seasonally appropriate drinks (hot spiced lemon and ginger drink!), and wandering around the stalls, looking anxiously at the sky which seemed to threaten rain intermittently.

Last night we signed up to MUBI for a free trial so that we could watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schonbrun's follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow (which I thought was excellent) — a camp, meta, self-aware, queer story about viewers' relationship with slasher movies. In it, an early career filmmaker is tasked with reviving a franchise of 80s horror movies, and travels to the remote setting of the first film, where the ageing actress who played its final girl (played by Gillian Anderson) is living a reclusive life in the camp where her character survived the fictional carnage. But it's not really a slasher film itself — it's about the titular cinematic sex and death (the killer in the film franchise is literally called 'Little Death'; this is not a subtle movie), and our voyeuristic relationship with them, and about coming of age and queer awakening, and a lot about being trans, and how that might affect someone's relationship with their physical body, and the resonances of this with a viewer's relationship with bodies on screen, and so on. Fair warning that although it's not really a horror movie, there is a lot of exaggerated horror movie style violence and gore on the screen.

In terms of reading, I finished off Chronicle of a Life Mislaid, which I had thought was a memoir about Marina Warner's own life, but is really an (unreliable, as it says in the subtitle) memoir of her parents' marriage. Both led an extraordinary life — they met when Warner's father was among the Allied troops stationed in Italy during the final years of WWII; her mother and aunts (due to a childhood spent in the United States) spoke fluent English and sort of attached themselves to the Allied military as translators. After the war, she returned with Warner's father to England, and later to Cairo in the dying days of British colonial indirect rule of Egypt as part of the strange community of European, Middle Eastern and North African drifters who washed up in that part of the world from all over the Mediterranean, flourishing briefly in a kind of bubble of unbelievable privilege, and then drifting on when that world ended. While Warner doesn't go into full details, it's clear her parents' marriage was not a happy one — her father had aristocratic aspirations, but didn't have the budget to live that kind of life, and was a chronic and unsuccessful gambler and financial speculator (Warner includes some of his letters back to her paternal grandparents, which are always begging for money or hoping that this or that recently deceased relative will leave him a legacy), and those tensions seem to have weighed heavily. Warner weaves this personal family story with a wider critical look at the currents of class and empire that underpinned this particular moment in time, and their echoes at the point in the twenty-first century in which she was writing (Brexit looms large). I thought this was fantastic!

I'm still working my way through Hell's Heart (Alexis Hall), a lesbian retelling of Moby Dick IN SPACE. The book begins with quotes from (among other things) the Bible, and Jupiter Ascending, so you know pretty much what you're getting in for. I find it a lot of fun — almost every sentence is an allusion or reference to something else (and not just the book's source material), but I do somewhat wish that Hall had had the imagination not to default to a spacefaring far future in which every cultural force resembles an unsubtle and extreme version of contemporary right-wing values in the United States (prosperity gospel, rampant Ayn Rand-style individualism, worship of 'the market,' — and even a moment in which the 'face eating leopards' meme makes an appearance). I get that this all fits with the story that Hall is trying to tell (and maybe there is a corner of this book's universe in which the values of other, non-21st-century-United States cultures hold sway), but as a non-American, the uncritical lack of imagination in this regard did start to grate after a while.

The rest of my Sunday will probably involve a proper look through the Yuletide tag set and letters post, another swing through the apple fair (we need to get our yearly haul of rare varieties of apple!), making sloe gin with the sloes I picked from local hedgerows, and cooking soup for dinner. All very relaxing and cosy, and exactly what I need before another week of new academic-year busyness.

*If you are a current university student and want me to explain more about these things, ask in the comments — they will save you so many logins and apparent paywalls.

Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, f/f, m/f, m/m and multi-ship fic, although I have a slight preference towards f/f, m/f, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read. You can also look at my Yuletide tag, which includes past letters, and recs posts of my previous gifts and other fic I've enjoyed in previous Yuletide colletions.

I have treating enabled on Ao3 and would be delighted to receive treats for any of my requests.

( General likes )

( DNWs )

Fandom-specific prompts:

( Prisoner (TV 2026) )

( Romanitas trilogy - Sophia McDougall )

( Space Demons trilogy - Gillian Rubinstein )

( Winternight trilogy - Katherine Arden )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

It's been an extremely autumnal weekend, almost to the point of cliché. On Friday afternoon, I picked up this year's autumn wreath for the door, made of leaves and dried flowers and bunches of red berries. The whole thing casts the most glorious colours of light back into the house when the afternoon sun shines through the door — the effect is almost like a stained glass window. Yesterday was cold enough that I had my first hot takeaway coffee since April — it's been a good run of iced coffee, and the switch to my cold weather order of a flat white is always a personal sign of the change in the seasons. And if that wasn't enough, this morning saw the first fog of the season, blanketing the land all throughout my walk down to the gym for my Sunday 1km swim, although by the time I emerged from my laps, it had dissipated.

I have, of course, dived into this season with great enthusiasm. After breakfast, Matthias and I walked into Little Downham — which is my favourite of the local walks, taking you along a bridleway through working farms, paddocks of cows and horses (this time we also encountered a pair being ridden slowly down the bridleway), and ending up in a little apple orchard on the edges of the village. We'd come there with intention, and returned home with tote bags filled with all sorts of varieties of apples, plus a generous handful of sloes, since I want to try making my own sloe gin this year.

Here's a photoset of all the fruit and foliage, in the beautiful autumn light.

I'm not normally one for themed October viewing (Halloween is not really a big deal for me), but we did end up watching a very stupid Irish horror movie called The Morrigan last night for Saturday film night. The paper-thin premise sees an underappreciated archaeologist heading to a remote western Irish island to work on a dig site which she believes is the final resting place of the titular pagan Irish goddess (her hypothesis being that the Morrigan was actually a real historical ruler whose place in the historical record was suppressed by misogynistic Christian missionaries), accompanied by her resentful teenage daughter, and a sleazy and sceptical colleague. The island is, of course, isolated, creepy, and hiding secrets of its own, the dig site of course unearths a burial casket whose presence unleashes a wave of chaos and violence, and I of course spent much of my time yelling at the TV ('academia doesn't work like that!' 'radio calling doesn't work like that!' 'why is there a giant ancient forest on an island to the west of Ireland which faces directly at the Atlantic Ocean?!' 'why does the ancient pagan goddess speak Modern Irish?!'), but since I wasn't expecting much, it was hard to be disappointed.

On Friday evening, I travelled down to London after work, and met Matthias for a live event with some of the journalists from the Kyiv Independent (if you don't know much about this English-language Ukrainian news organisation, their about page gives a very paraphrased version of their extraordinary origins and success in spite of quite considerable obstacles; I've been a paying subscriber since February 2022). Like all journalists, those at the Kyiv Independent are used to being on the other side of the screen or page, maintaining a journalistic distance even when reporting on the existential fight of their own country and the terrible things they've witnessed, but the live event takes a different tone, with five different staff members (four journalists and the outlet's CEO) giving a personal take on life in Ukraine, interweaving ordinary experiences (embarking on a new relationship, caring for a sick parent) with the consequential and awful events they and their country are forced to live through. This was followed, after an interval (where, inevitably, I bumped into one of my colleagues and her husband, who are very involved with Convoy4Ukraine), with a panel discussion led by a journalist from the Guardian, about reporting on a war in their own country while also getting a fledgling independent newspaper off the ground and then grow its readership, which was also interesting — they're all extremely impressive people, and what they've built and achieved is truly amazing. No Ukrainian event would go ahead without some QR codes linking to a fundraiser, and in this case the Kyiv Independent team were paying it forward and helping the small, independent local media outlet Kordon Media (based in the northern city of Sumy, which is right on the Russian border) get through what promises to be a very challenging winter. I was delighted and unsurprised to see that within less than ten hours of the event in London, the requisite £9000 was fully funded.

This in-person event on Friday unintentionally followed on from another Ukraine-related panel discussion which I attended online — the book launch for Guardian culture writer Charlotte Higgins's work Ukrainian Lessons, which is about her experiences travelling around the country during the fullscale war, and the various cultural workers (authors, artists, opera singers, etc) she got to know, and more broadly about the role of art and cultural identity in a time of war. The panel was hosted by historian Olesya Khromeychuk (head of the Ukrainian Institute London), and also included author Sasha Dovzhyk and chef and author Olia Hercules. I of course left with a whole slew of books I wanted to buy, chief among them Higgins's and Dovzhyk's own.

Things are picking up at work. September to December is the busiest time of year for me in terms of teaching load (although really March to May is the most draining, since it's when my entire calendar is just filled with panicked students working on their dissertations and all wanting to meet individually for help), and I had my first timetabled classes of the year for postgraduates last week. These were fairly light-touch — a two-part induction co-taught with my amazing former colleague who now heads up a library in another faculty. This was a particularly friendly and enthusiastic bunch of master's students, and it was nice to start off this year's postgrad teaching on such a high note. Next week is really when the timetable starts to get very packed — I'm in every day, whereas normally I work from home twice a week, which should give some idea — and then it's much of the same until the second week of December. Let's see how it goes this time around!

Sunday is half over, and I want to spend the rest of the afternoon in calm activities. I'll try and finish my book (Marina Warner's family history/memoir Inventory of a Life, which so far has covered her parents' early relationship — her father a British soldier fighting on the Italian front during WWII, her mother a young Italian woman who attached herself to the Allied troops as an English translator due to a childhood spent in the United States — and the family's move to Cairo to head up a branch of WH Smith booksellers/stationery suppliers there, and is shaping up as an excellent and critical portrait of the lives, mores and values of the empire-building British upper class at a very specific point in time), I'll do a long yoga class, and I'll try to catch up on Dreamwidth, and generally reset my brain before a likely tiring week at work.

My autumnal equinox subscription perfume (complete with a seasonal short film and piece of art work and, yes, such a thing is a ridiculous indulgence) is designed to smell like wet heather and bracken ferns, and I love it so much. In case you can't tell, I am incredibly, incredibly ready for it to be autumn.

Let's start this weekend on a positive note! This week's open thread prompt asks:

What is something you can do better now than you could do this time last year?

My own answers are mainly exercise related. I can swim faster — this is not a specific goal, since I don't swim competitively (I swim because if I didn't, my mental health would be in the toilet), but it is satisfying to see in any case. I'm also stronger all around — I can lift heavier weights in the various exercises I do in my weekly power pump classes in the gym — and that is an actual goal that I set myself for the year, so I'm incredibly pleased. I think with both the swimming and the strength, I will hit some kind of physical wall at some point (I can't just keep getting faster at swimming forever, and I will reach the limits of what I'm physically capable of lifting in terms of the weights), but my background in gymnastics has given me a lifetime of understanding that every person has their own physical limits, and I have no problem with that. For now, it's just fun to see how much I'm slowly able to improve.

I also think that every year I get just a little bit better at understanding my garden. I'm entirely self-taught (other than little pieces of passive understanding I glean from time to time via gardening accounts on Instagram), so each year it's a process of trial and error, learning from what worked, and avoiding things that didn't — and that's enough for me.

What about you?