Dear Santa, We’re the Open Shelf editorial team. Our favourite things to do are to engage with our friends in the OLA community. We write, we provide feedback, we get creative with pictures and tweets, we play tag all the time, and just basically have lots of fun. We’ll be snuggled at home during the holiday season, hopefully taking a break from work but still dreaming of new stories we can tell in Open Shelf in 2021. Although this has been a crazy year—the “Year of COVID”—we’ve still been able to play with our Open Shelf contributors and they have sent us lots of great stories to print in the magazine.

What’s new in Open Shelf: November 2018
This month we have a special issue on language and power. Co-curated by Jennifer Brown, Tracy Munusami and John Pateman, this collection of stories and opinion pieces reflects a varied understanding of how the words we use impact our relationships with language and each other.
We have contributions from folks in Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Plus, we have some “calls” for OLA members: To share their projects for the UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages (2019) and to join us for our “editorial hackathon” at Super Conference 2019.
Our thanks to our guest editors for suggesting this important topic and bringing together the following rich variety of voices and perspectives (in the order the articles appear in the magazine):
- From the editor(s): Words matter
- Editorial guidelines: A statement of principles (Martha Attridge Bufton)
- Inclusive librarianship: On whiteness (Isabel Espinal)
- Sharing our words, transforming our relationships (Rashed Ahmad, Mandissa Arlain,Valentina Ly, Arvind Singh and Tara Zarrin)
- Language and power in the academic library classroom (Sajni Lacey)
- Racialized is the new Black, and Brown and … (Dreeni Geer)
- It’s Elementary: Making room for diverse voices in our school libraries
(Jennifer Brown) - Carro, transporta libros or book truck: Navigating library stacks in two languages
(Martha Attridge Bufton and Isaac Fierro) - What the … [add library superlative language here]? (Ken Williment)
- Political correctness and society—have we really gone mad? (John Vincent)
- UNESCO Year of Indigenous languages: What are you doing?
- Super Conference 2019: Unleash your inner editor
As always, we hope you enjoy the show!