vivdunstan: (benny)
Onto another one, and this is a relisten for me. As I wrote on Gallifrey Base back in June 2010:

"Timeless Passages is indeed wonderful. I've only heard Benny on audio in some of season 3, Timeless Passages, the Diogenes Damsel, and the Companion Chronicle story. Of these Timeless Passages is easily my favourite, and requires no prior knowledge. And it's *so* timey-wimey :) I just love it."


And my feelings haven't changed, though I've now heard way way more Benny audios than I had back then. Timeless Passages is a quite superb Benny audio, and a brilliant piece of scifi storytelling. Totally standalone, so you don't need to have listened to any of the other Benny audios. As is often the case this one has a very small cast, but they are used superbly, very well acted and written, and the story keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. A tightly plotted mystery box of a timey wimey puzzle set inside a giant library. What's not to love about that?

It's a rare Benny audio from this era still available to buy from Big Finish on CD, but also in DRM-free download. £5.99 plus shipping if ordering by post. If you hear just one Benny audio, this is the one I'd recommend by far.

vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
Heads up for fellow academics as well as other authors. I'm not a prolific published academic, but at least two of my academic journal papers (on Scottish book history and library history) have been pilfered for AI training purposes. All done without my permission. You can search for these at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/

Lots of academic papers (co-authored) from Martin on there as well. And loads by my historian and computer scientist friends. It's also amusing seeing author namesakes. I now know which academic with a similar name (my maiden name - I have some early published academic work under my maiden name) is publishing prolifically about healthcare and medical matters! That Academia.edu keeps emailing me unhelpfully about, referring to "Vivienne Dunstan"!
vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
Ordering my belated festive batch of magazines from my favourite postal newsagent in Whitstable. And just realised that the latest issue of British Archaeology Magazine from the Council for British Archaeology has articles about both The Detectorists TV series and Innerpeffray Library in Perthshire. Ok, got to buy that one!
vivdunstan: Photo of some of my books (books)
Very happily tonight started browsing Stirling University’s Books and Borrowing 1750-1850 database of Scottish libraries, which is now online, including contributions from me of library borrowing transcripts and databases for Haddington and Selkirk libraries.

P.S. The facts and figures section computing over the underlying databases is hugely impressive. Here are its entries for the libraries in Haddington and Selkirk. Scroll down to the very bottom to see some stunning charts over time.
vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
This afternoon I was photocopying a small number of pages from a borrowed library book using a rather old DSLR camera. That Panasonic LUMIX camera still has double the number of megapixels of my final generation iPod touch, and more than most mobile phones today. And given that this was a pretty dense text book it was easier to just use this camera. Which was already charged and available and ready to hand. I can copy over the pictures quickly using my laptop which has a SD card slot, and have tweaked them and turned them into a PDF to add to my research folder for the relevant academic journal paper I'm working on. If I was photographing in an archive extremely dense old handwriting I would also use my old DSLR.

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vivdunstan: Part of own photo taken in local university botanic gardens. Tree trunks rise atmospherically, throwing shadows from the sun on the ground. (Default)
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