I don’t read the winners of the National Book Award, the Booker or the Giller Prize or any other major literary prize.

But I do read the winning titles of the Diagram Prize, which is bestowed on the book with the silliest title. I’m almost certain that the titles are better than the books themselves. Furthermore, the pleasure or gratification is instantaneous. Why waste time reading the book?

The 2013 winner is Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop, by Reginald Bakeley.  To my disappointment and surprise, it beat God’s Doodle: the Life and Times of the Penis, by Tom Hickman.  It lost by this much.

In 1978, to fend off boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair, some book distributors (Diagram Group) thought it might be a “passe-temps” to offer a prize for the most bizarre book title. That year the prize went to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. I was blissfully unaware that some mice actually sported vestments.

Some of my favorite winners are Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1996), Cooking with Poo (2011), and what might be considered a companion volume, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (1989). Worldcat shows, that somehow, 173 libraries acquired the 1989 edition, while 253 opted for the 1994 reprint.  Cracks in the approval plans?

Only 3 libraries dared purchase Cooking with Poo -all of them Australian. If scatological titles don’t sit well with you, perhaps The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (2006) or Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service (2001) might pique your interest. The last named should be a futuristic detective novel, but it isn’t.

Fresh out of Iibrary school, I considered purchasing The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution (1979) if only to prominently display the book cover as I rode the subway, but I was finishing Sophie’s Choice (Styron) and promised myself Shibumi (Trevanian) next.

I eagerly anticipate the list of contenders for the 2014 Prize; be still my beating heart.

Mobile technology, which includes the proliferation of mobile apps that can be leveraged for research, teaching and learning purposes, has fundamentally changed the way people look for, access, evaluate, and manage information. This past summer I was lucky enough to attend the annual three-day Osheaga music festival. When I received my tickets (RFID bracelets) in the mail, the envelope included information on downloading the Osheaga app. The app was great. It included the three-day schedule, artist biographies, site maps with stage locations, all kinds of multimedia content, and you could use the app to activate your RFID bracelet, which could then be used to enter a whole slew on contests and promotions. It occurred to me more than once during those three days that tailored apps are going to become more commonplace in many aspects of our lives, including libraries!

Although perhaps not as exciting as a three day outdoor summer indie rock concert, the library has created a recommended mobile apps web page, which contains apps selected by librarians that are particularly useful for research, teaching and learning. The web page is still in its infancy, however, we decided to focus on apps which facilitate access to, and use of, collections and resources the library is already subscribing to, as well as apps that will help students and faculty in their daily work. To this end, we have sections on Reading apps, Citation Management apps, and Productivity apps, as well as discipline-specific apps. I predict that the discipline-specific apps section will grow quickly over the next little while, as subject specialist add sections on apps specifically useful in their respective disciplines, as our colleague Jill Boruff has done for health sciences.

The group responsible for the apps web page is also charged with promoting important apps. The first two apps that we’ve decided to highlight are BrowZine and PressReader. BrowZine delivers thousands of academic journals to your iPad or Android tablet. BrowZine works by organizing the articles found in Open Access and subscription databases, uniting them into complete journals, then arranging these journals on a common newsstand. The result is an easy and familiar way to browse, read, and monitor scholarly journals across the disciplines. PressReader is an app that is used to access and download the over 2,000 full-content newspapers & magazines accessible via our PressDisplay subscription. This app works on both smartphones and tablets. To download newspapers you must be on the university network, either on the McGill WiFi, or from home using the Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Please check out our recommended apps page every once in a while to see what new apps have been added, and please feel free to send me any app suggestions that you may have for possible inclusion.

I realize I’m about a week late on this post but I don’t think it has to be Open Access week for us to discuss Open Access issues.

Open access refers to the principle and practice of making scholarly publications free and open to everyone. While you’re at McGill you may not reflect often on the fact that the articles you cite in your papers aren’t actually free. They’re free to you while you’re in school (well…note technically free…you pay tuition) but if you’ve ever tinkered around on Google Scholar and been asked to pay $40 to access an article, you’ve dipped your toe in the world of paid-for academic content.

Why does open access matter? Well, for one, most scholarly articles are to some extent publicly funded (that is, they are authored by people working at publicly funded institutions such as universities). Additionally though, it allows for information to be disseminated and spread to the widest audience possible. The more people who can access the work you’ve done, the more people who can build it on it and advance their own research. It is believed that this leads to greater discoveries and knowledge.

Open access isn’t without its detractors and even within academic circles, certain concepts of open access are misunderstood.

What do you think? Are we moving to a model of free scholarly content? What are your opinions on the open access debate?