Do I have boogers in my nose?

Just checking. Now that I am on site for the residency portion of the UPitt MLIS program I hope everyone else is enjoying the opportunity to meet their peers as much as I am. It's always so important to put faces to names and really get to know the people that I am going to rely on heavily for the next 2 years. Good thing they all seem fun and friendly!

During the lecture today, we were talking about technology and the resistance to change that some library professionals seem to exhibit. As we discussed, perhaps the best approach to warm objectors is to present examples and real life situations where they might use technology and sophisticated tools and that would help with the comfort level. I can understand the resistance but I think the lure to be "innovative" and "cutting edge" is more alluring to me than remaining static and unchanging. Go figure, my past life revolved around redesigning processes and tools that employees used to make their experience better and offer as many things through a self-service model as possible.

Here are a few humorous examples of general everyday people using technology in interesting ways.
1. As we were leaving Turkey on a bus to reach the town where we would fly from, we witnessed a wonderful, inventive phenomena. People that want to send packages or boxes locally to towns that are close by will often stop a dolmus (small bus) and just give them their package and a small fee and the recipient will pickup the package from the bus station at the other end (or from the side of the road as the bus travels through). My husband and I watched an enterprising young man hand off his package, pay his fee, and then whip out his cell phone and take a digital photograph of the license plate of the dolmus to presumably send to the recipient so they could identify the bus (and more likely to have proof in case of foul play). Ingenious!

2. At the end of this trip, we stayed for one night in a hotel and left very early the next morning to catch our flight back to the US. Upon arrival to San Francisco, I realized I had left my precious school notebook with the passwords and user account names for all of the tools we've used in LIS2600. Major trauma! I send an email asking the owner of the hotel to please type the information in an email and send it to me. I begged and pleaded and explained the importance and how I would absolutely DIE without this information. A few hours later I received an email and opened it to find a .jpg attachment. My wonderfully helpful host had taken a picture of the page I needed and then mailed my folder on to our new home. Again, what a clever and insightful way to use technology to save time and reproduce images.

Bravo to my creative Turkish friends!