The Library is the Heart of a University.

The Phoenix Training at Southern Methodist University on this past Friday was pretty good, and I'm glad I went. Aside from the Keynote address, however, it was all pretty free-form and largely unstructured, basically a morning and afternoon "rap" session of all the attendees. The morning rap session was a general discussion about the keynote address and its implications for all of us. The groups were distributed at random, by attendee last name, so we had a mix of Reference, ILL, Tech Services, and Administrators. The afternoon talks were self-selected "Special Interest Groups", and I attended the session on Original Cataloging and Metadata, which was a session attended by fellow catalogers and metadata librarians. We talked some about ContentDM and MARC and other topics of current interest. I thought about bringing up RDA, but couldn't find an opportunity to slip it into the conversation. We were just getting on a roll when it was time to conclude and join an afternoon tour group.

There were actually two tours that we took, one before lunch and one in the afternoon. I opted to tour the Fondren Library (the main campus library) in the morning and the Art Library in the afternoon.

It was a little amusing to me as a Rice University alumnus to find another Fondren Library in Texas. I had done my SLIS student practicum in the Tech Services department of Rice U's Fondren Library way back in Fall 2004.

The Southern Methodist University campus was very beautiful, but my camera died early on in the day (I had rechargeable batteries in it, but had forgotten to recharge them the night before). Anymore I've pretty much decided that if you're serious about digital photography, you have to buy your batteries FRESH, the very day you plan a photo shoot. Too much time elapses between the time you put in new batteries and the time you pick up the camera to do a photo shoot to do it any other way, I'm discovering. You should also always bring a cheap, disposable analogue camera as a back up. Even in an age of digital photography, I still love to shoot with Black and White film with a disposable camera. Sure, you can always do ersatz "B&W" photography with a greyscale filter in digital editing, but it's just not the same; not to me anyway.

Now that I know better how to get to and from the SMU campus, I have resolved to go back one Saturday in the summer and plan to spend an entire Saturday exploring the place (and its surrounding neighborhoods). I will be one happy shutterbug that day. There's even a La Madeline restaurant right next to campus where I can get a hearty "French Country Breakfast", my favorite of their menu items. It really is a very nice looking, exclusive part of Dallas that reminds me a lot of the Rice U. and Museum District parts of Houston. Too bad it's a nominally religious institution, while Rice U. is unabashedly secular in nature.