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Yesterday we held the inaugural Emerging Technologies Talk for the staff development committee. Our plan is to host a monthly discussion (two weeks off from the journal group) on new and emerging technologies.

To get us off to a good start I though I’d go with something that people in the library would be interested in personally, might find relevant for work, and would show that emerging technologies can be fun. The topic? Social Software built around books and reading. You might have heard of some of them: GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, Amazon’s profiles, Google’s My Library, and My Worldcat. I ran through a quick presentation just to get everyone on the same page, then we talked about some of the similarities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses in each of the options.

If you’re interested, here’s the presentation:

We’d like to host on of these workshops once a month, so if there’s a new technology that you’re curious about, just let me know! We’ve already had requests that next month we talk about some of the things that Google is doing (the Chrome browser and the move from Google Pages to Googld Sites) and some of the things that former Google employees are doing (the Cuil search engine and Friendfeed).