ARLIS Texas Mexico members voted at this years business meeting to fund one award at $500 to assist travel to the ARLIS/NA conference in Denver, Colorado, May 1-5, 2008.

The Lois Swan Jones Award honors Professor Jones, Emerita at the University of North Texas, by underwriting participation of Texas-Mexico chapter members at the national meeting. While first-time conference attendees are especially encouraged, the award committee urges everyone with interest and need to apply. The primary criteria is that applicants not have full institutional funding. Previous winners are eligible. A description of the award, procedures for applying, and a list of previous recipients is available on the chapter's Web site.

The deadline for receipt of applications is Friday April 18, 2008. The award winner will be announced on Wednesday April 23rd. Questions or concerns should be forwarded to Meriann Bidgood. Conference program and registration information will be posted soon at the ARLIS/NA conference Web site.

Earlier this year, Mark Pompelia contacted me to act as "technical liaison" for the chapter's Web site. This request came shortly after his discovery that the site was not allowing folk to log in and add/edit content. I acquiesced and begin the process of figuring out the culprit that was causing the problem. We're actually running an older version of Drupal, and I suspect that our host's recent upgrade of the PHP scripting language created an incompatibility with some of our Drupal PHP code. After a lot of hunting, I found a patch which fixed the problem. So we're back in business. This recent problem does highlight our need to begin thinking about a plan to upgrade to the most recent version of Drupal, otherwise we risk similar problems cropping up in the future.

For now, I remain, fondly, your "technical liaison." I also have newly rejoined the chapter and ARLIS/NA, so I am officially back in the fold.

Welcome to the third issue of volume 33 of The Medium. This issue is packed with summaries of tours from our annual chapter meeting in Dallas--who knew that such familiar territory could take on a new visage with all the varied venues and events to which we were treated? Our collective gratitude again goes to Gwen Dixie, who arranged every aspect with such effortless command (and even hosted us for dinner at her house!). We also have an excellent summary of our Dallas panel session, Collecting Early Texas Art, from our chapter president. In addition to items related to our annual meeting, this issue also features some announcements and summaries of events throughout the state, such as the Texas Digital Library meeting in Austin and the upcoming AASL conference in Houston.