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 2020
So, we’ll bend Tom Jones’s lyrics for Try to remember:
Try to remember the kind of November
When life was slow[er] and oh, so mellow[er].
Try to remember the kind of November
When grass was [not longer] green and grain [not] so yellow.
Try to remember [this] kind of November
. . . And if you remember then follow, [follow], [follow].
This iconic song is from the Broadway musical The Fantasticks . . . and so appropriate as we almost close out 2020: a year most fantastick.
This month we are finishing off some two multi-part articles, one on creating an open educational resource and the other on evaluating information related to Indigenous-Crown relations. We are also continuing our profile of school librarians and bringing you a new column (Technical expertise) and two features: One on celebrating Hallowe’en safely and the other on finding the right web conferencing tool.
Here are the articles, in the order that they appear in the magazine.
- Trick or treat, lots to eat … at the drive-thru
- Raising your profile: New social media support for Open Shelf contributors
- The joys of job hunting: In Technical Expertise, a new column from library tech Brianna Allen
- Taking responsibility: A single source may be CRAP when talking about governance
- Transitions in uncertainty: a message from the InsideOCULA Editor-in-chief
- Due north: Recovery phases for a new library
- Amplifying the voices of school libraries: Jonelle St. Aubyn
- APA tutorial take two: The benefits of OERs and Pressbooks across sectors
- Calls for stories: Code of conduct (coding) and Comfort and joy (the holidays)
Why did the Romanian stop reading for the night? To give their Bucharest!
And take our monthly polls on Halloween and Pressbooks.