Last spring, Bates, Colby and Bowdoin colleges channeled their long-standing rivalry for altruistic purposes. The three schools competed to collect the most books to donate to the Polytechnic University of Kabul, in Afghanistan.

A Bates student, Kabul native Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12, launched the project in an effort to restock the university’s library, left critically short of English literature and textbooks.

The book drive collected more than 2,000 books in a variety of disciplines, including math, science, sociology, history, and women and gender studies. Bates raised the most books, with a total of 41 boxes. Colby ranked second with 33 boxes, and Bowdoin came in third with a total of 22 boxes.

Bates alum Chris Robinson ’07 and other friends of the colleges contributed by picking up the tab for shipping costs.

The Polytechnic University of Kabul, the second-largest university in the city, was established in 1963. Like many major institutions in Afghanistan, government inattention, violent conflict and constant upheaval during the past three decades have left the university lacking many basic resources.

“All in all, everyone was incredibly grateful for the donations,” said Basij-Rasikh, “and is looking forward to expand the program if possible.”

Along with the book drive and an initiative supporting land mine victims, Basij-Rasikh worked with Matiullah Amin, an Afghanistan native who is now a junior at Williams College, to found the Afghan Youth Initiative this summer. This nonprofit, non-governmental organization aims to build a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan by empowering today’s youth.

Women’s and men’s tennis coach Paul Gastonguay ’89 congratulates his number two doubles team, Erika Blauth and Brooke Morse-Karzen, after the pair defeated Colby in a match at Wallach Tennis Center.

Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges have received a $280,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build a model program for the collaborative development of library collections. The plan is to share collection resources in all formats, electronic and print, reduce unnecessary duplication and redundant purchases, and make a broader universe of materials available at each campus.

Previous grants from the Mellon Foundation to the three schools, which are collectively called “CBB,” have helped build a service framework for collection sharing, enabling the libraries to develop technologies to share catalogs and support interlibrary loan activity.

The goals of the current project will bring collaboration among the three libraries to the next level. The libraries plan to determine how to expand the collection of materials available to the CBB academic communities, share budgetary and space resources so that all three libraries can operate more cost-effectively, and build a faculty culture that embraces the plan.

“CBB libraries have established a distinguished track record of resource-sharing,” notes Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services at Bates College. “We recognize the strategic advantage to three small colleges to combine the strengths of our research collections. This project gives us the resources to plan and shape our collections to make our libraries meet even more of our needs.”

The grant will be used over two years to hire two temporary librarians who will enable current staff to devote time to the project.

“We need the time,” says Bowdoin College Librarian Sherrie Bergman. “We need the project work to be conducted by librarians who have established collegial relations with faculty members and who are knowledgeable about the research and curricular needs of our faculty and students.”

The CBB librarians are identifying areas of historical curricular and collection strength for each school and each college. Four pilot curricular areas are being selected to begin the project, which ultimately will span all disciplinary areas and all subject areas of the collections. The pilot areas will be among those that are taught at all three schools, place budgetary pressures on their respective libraries, and are interdisciplinary in nature.

The libraries are using software tools to analyze areas of collection strength and overlap, measured against current and projected curricular needs. The tools offer collection comparisons on such parameters as collection age, format and past circulation. The data analysis will support development of new approaches to collection development, weeding, cancellation, print archiving and preservation activities.

The libraries will be working in new ways with vendors for the acquisition of new materials. They will develop joint monographic approval plans with the goal of acquiring a larger number of unique book titles, and test new models for the development of shared journal and electronic book collections.

Because collection-building strategies differ among the disciplines, librarians will consult closely with academic departments and individual faculty members on the three campuses. They will discuss curricular concentrations and collection strengths, overlaps and gaps to achieve increased collection breadth at each school. Space limitations at each library make it logical also to consider cooperative de-accessioning, print archiving and off-site storage agreements.

In the second year of the grant, the model book approval plan will be extended to all appropriate subject areas, and the libraries will write a joint collection management document that presents the strategic vision for a shared collection plan. They also will review benchmark data to measure the success of the new model plan to bring more unique materials to each school.

Project librarians say the enthusiasm and high satisfaction with resource-sharing among faculty and students make the collaboration possible. Results of the project will be widely disseminated among the library community with the hope that the CBB partnership can serve as a model for other library collaborations.

Paul Josephson, associate professor in the Colby College history department, gives a talk titled The Destruction of Nature in Russia and the West at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 20, in Room G65, Pettengill Hall.

Colby’s Russian and Soviet history professor, Josephson specializes in 20th century science and technology. His books include New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton University Press, 1997), which won the Marshall Shulman Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies; and Red Atom (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1999), a history of peaceful nuclear programs in the former Soviet Union.

Jose Soto and Michael Hyde, of the Lewiston-based Maine Rural Workers Coalition, discuss the relationship between environmental justice and agriculture at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in Room 204 of the Carnegie Science Hall.

The Maine Rural Workers Coalition was formed in 1997 at the DeCoster Egg Farm in Turner by workers, many of them immigrants, who sought to improve dangerous and inhumane conditions at the farm. Today the coalition promotes programs that help rural workers protect their health and safety, develop leadership skills and build communities that respect and celebrate their multicultural nature.

Soto, the organization’s executive director, and Hyde, its chemical and pesticide director, will discuss aspects of environmental justice relating to agriculture, with emphasis on the DeCoster story. Their appearance is part of U.S. Environmental Politics and Policy, a course in the environmental studies program.

Taught by Peter Rogers, an instructor in that interdisciplinary program, the course examines the development and current state of U.S. environmental policy at the federal, state and local levels, while placing such policymaking in the broader context of politics, economics and society.

Relating the students’ educational experience to current local issues is key to the environmental studies program at Bates. “It’s easy to think of environmental justice and agriculture workers’ issues as being distant and disconnected from life here,” says Rogers. “Jose Soto and his colleagues from the Maine Rural Workers Coalition are able to puncture this bubble by pointing what goes on in and around our community and elsewhere in Maine.”

For more information about the lectures, please call 207-786-6255.

The panels will be organized around several themes: the political economy of social and environmental sciences, scientific knowledge and discourses of difference, modernity and medicine and natural vs. national science.

Michelle Rowley, assistant lecturer in the gender and development studies program, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, will deliver the keynote address “Border Conversations: Interrogating the Seams of Science” at 3:15 p.m. A roundtable discussion, moderated by Rowley, will follow the talk.

The conference begins at 9 a.m with introductory remarks, followed by the first panel, “The Political Economy of Social and Environmental Sciences. Participants include Bates senior Bradley Wilson, on “Producing Sustainable Coffee”; Rachel Narehood Austin, assistant professor of chemistry and environmental studies, Bates College, on “A Post-Modern Approach to Assessing Environmental Risk: Gauging the Human Health Risks Posed by Lead Exposure”; and Lillian Guerra, assistant professor of history, Bates College, on “Cuba, Cubans and the Harvard Summer School for Cuban Teachers: Making a Science of Civilization.”

The second panel, “Natural/National Science, Modernity and Medicine,” begins at 11 a.m. Panelists are Scott MacEachern, associate professor of anthropology, Bowdoin College, on “Genes, Tribes and African History”; Susan Bell, professor of sociology, Bowdoin College, on “Sexuality, Culture and Social Change: Connecting ‘Women’; and ‘Science’ in Microbicide Research”; and Kiran Asher, assistant professor of political science and women’s studies, Bates College, on “The ‘Global Environment’ Discourse and Biodiversity Research in Columbia.”

Following a break for lunch, the third 90-minute panel, “Scientific Knowledge and Discourses of Difference,” begins at 1 p.m. with Anindyo Roy, assistant professor of English, Colby College, on “Labor Visibility and the Colonial Apparatus: The Case of Leonard Woolf”; NeEddra James, a Bowdoin College religion major, on “Imaging and Imagining the Black Female Subject in 19th-Century Anthropology”; and Patricia J. Saunders, assistant professor of English, Bowdoin College, on “Those Who Insist on Be(Come)Ing: Anthropology and the Task of Translating Identity for Caribbean Subjects.

The 3:15 p.m. keynote address and roundtable discussion will be followed by a 90-minute reception at the Benjamin Mays Center. For more information, call 207-786-6472 or 207-725-3670.

The conference is sponsored by the Women and Scientific Literacy Project; the political science department, the environmental studies program and the Office of the President at Bates College; The Hewlett Group; and the English department at Bowdoin College.

This ambitious state-funded program enhances library services throughout Maine. It is open to any Maine library that wishes to participate. Patrons of Maine Info Net libraries will be able to search the holdings of member libraries through their local library computers. Requests to borrow materials are initiated online and books will be sent to the patron’s home library for pick-up.

URSUS, the University of Maine system, joined Maine Info Net in mid January. Beginning in March, the Portland Public Library and many other libraries will add their catalogs to the online information system. Maine Info Net was funded through a bond issue approved by Maine voters in June 1996 and will eventually combine the information resources of academic, public and school libraries and many research and medical institutions.

Maine is the first state to implement an statewide online system that includes academic, public, state and school libraries.

More than a decade ago, the Colby, Bates and Bowdoin libraries established a direct document delivery service for sharing materials, collaboratively automated their catalogs and began jointly acquiring electronic resources. More recently, through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, they introduced shared videoconferencing, faculty and staff technology training, collaborative development of web-based instructional materials and establishment of study abroad programs in London, Quito and Cape Town.

Participation in Maine Info Net represents a commitment by the three private colleges to partner with the University of Maine and public and private libraries statewide. The focus is to enhance educational endeavors, to strengthen the state’s economy and to broadly make accessible to the citizens of Maine the historically rich library resources held by the three college libraries.