Innovation Sessions focus on innovative or entrepreneurial thinking in libraries and consist of 5 -minute presentations.

• ChronosHub: An OA management system to navigate the complexities, best practices, collaboration, standardization, and automation of information.
• FNR (the Luxembourg National Research Fund) provides OA through ChronosHub. Its Open Access Fund looks at how a new OA management infrastructure is unburdening researchers and providing solutions. It optimizes communication between authors, institutions, and publishers.
• Baylor University Libraries:  Its digital preservation of 70 collections of Robert Browning has experienced more than 90% accuracy in scanning.
• Columbia University Libraries: Advancing he academic reading experience. For fiscal year 2021, eBook expenditures were over $3.5 million. The rationale for implementation of an eBooks project was concern about the user experience of eBooks, complicated access requirements, more remote access after COVID, and possible better open source solutions. The New York Public library’s SimplyE reader containing 28,000 books was introduced using the library catalog as a hub for discovery. The Palace Project is a separate open source product apart from the New York Public Library and is being developed for release in 2022. It may have up to a million books.
• The Citadel: Masking up: Library Crisis Response: The Citadel makerspace which is in the library undertook to produce face masks which were in short supply using a 3D printer. After obtaining approval for the project,several materials.to create the SAFE mask were tried. Here is a photo of the mask that was produced.
  
  Each mask took about 9 hours to print.,so local printers pitched in and helped with the project. A total of 1,001 masks were made. This project has shown that a crisis can help cut through red tape. It is important to establish relationships on and off campus, and a library can be a vital resource.
• Hum: (Part of Silverchair) .Are professional associations growing and engaging audiences in a digital era?  No–many of them are declining in membership.. Today’s customers want experiences that are fast, connected, and above all else, personalized. Associations are in a prime position but are not playing the modern game. Hum is a new type of platform that brings together audience data and syncs in real time.
  Benetech makes downloaded content available for people with print disabilities. Its Bookshare program has over 5 million books in its repository and over 800,000 readers worldwide. Membership free to any print disabled reader in an educational institution. Buying born accessible content (i.e. content that is in digital form when it comes out of the production process) is the best way to serve disabled readers. Benetech’s  Global Certified Accessible (GCA) program is the world’s first international fully accessible third party program and was created to help publishers move forward by certifying their output. Sixty organizations are participating in the program, and hundreds of titles are already for sale.. Hurdles to overcome include print page fidelity, navigation, image descriptions, and language shifts.  EBooks are the only truly accessible content; accessible eBook files must be 100% compatible with print book. Universities must be sure to become users of Bookstore–it is free–and adapt purchasing policies to require third party certified content.
  

  Don Hawkins
  Charleston Conference Blogger