As the culmination of a three-day Tolkien Film Festival at Bates College from Monday, Oct. 22, through Wednesday, Oct. 24, leading Tolkien scholar Thomas Shippey delivers a lecture titled “Filming the Lord of the Rings: How Peter Jackson Coped with J.R.R. Tolkien,” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.  The public is invited to attend the talk, followed by reception in the Olin lobby, free of charge. For more information, contact 207-786-6135 or this  olinarts@bates.edu.

Walter J. Ong chair of humanities at St. Louis University, Shippey received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Shippey’s primary areas of focus are medieval literature, especially the earliest literature of Anglo-Saxon England, and modern fantasy and science fiction. These interests merge in his two much-reprinted and translated books on J.R.R. Tolkien, The Road to Middle Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Houghton-Mifflin, 1982) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Harper Collins, 2000).

Both Shippey and Tolkien attended King Edward’s School, Birmingham, as schoolboys, and each played rugby for Old Edwardians. The two men both taught at Oxford University. As an English professor at Leeds University, Shippey inherited Tolkien’s chair and syllabus.

President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, Shippey’s most recent publications is The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous (Brepols, 2005) and Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (Walking Tree Press, 2007). His numerous books include The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (Oxford University Press), The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (Oxford University Press) and Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (University of Georgia Press).

All three film screenings begin at 7 p.m. and are held in the Filene Room of Pettigrew Hall, 75 College St., Bates College. The public is invited to attend at no cost. For more information about the screenings, please call 207-786-8294.

• Day One of the Tolkien Film Festival, Monday, Oct. 22, features Fellowship of the Ring (2001, 178 min.), the first of director Peter Jackson’s three films based on Tolkien’s epic “The Lord of the Rings.”
• Day Two, Tuesday, Oct. 23, features The Two Towers (2002, 179 min.).
• Day Three, Wednesday, Oct. 24, features The Return of the King (2003, 201 min.), the final installment in Jackson’s trilogy.

Shippey’s talk is sponsored by the English department, the college lectures committee, the interdisciplinary studies program and the humanities division. The Tolkien Film Festival is sponsored by the college’s information and library services.

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.

According to ILS, today’s e-mail will be queued and delivered when service is restored. The daylong break in e-mail service is due to a hardware upgrade on the Abacus server. This will impact a number of other services today as well, such as dial-in access, the Ladd Library homepage, and certain older Bates Web pages that reside on the Abacus server.

Please note, though, that the following service will be available during the Abacus upgrade:

The Ladd Library Catalog & Databases are accessible at http://ladd.bates.edu/. Moreover, Bates “.xml” Webpages, domain name services, off-campus web browsing, and the Banner and Mithras systems will all be up and running.

On Thursday, Oct. 18, routine preventive maintenance will be performed from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Any network service may be unavailable. Access to the Abacus Server is expected to be available barring unexpected circumstances from the previous day.

On Friday, Oct. 19, public lab Macintoshes and the Ladd Library Catalog will be unavailable.