Michigan State University has received a collection of more than 850,000 movies, CDs, and videogames from California-based Rovi Corp. The new media collection is one of the largest media collections held by a library in the United States, and is now publicly available.
“The ‘Rovi Media Collection’ dramatically enhances our teaching curriculum and research within the college of music, popular culture, and film studies, and an emerging gaming program,” says Clifford Haka, director of libraries at Michigan State.
Haka says the library consists of CDs that have been made commercially available in the United States, as well as some releases imported from Europe. The DVD collection, which began when DVDs were introduced into the market in the late 1990s, also represents the vast majority of DVDs released in the U.S. He says the games archive focuses primarily on console and PC games, beginning in 1999.
The Rovi Media Collection includes more than 1,000 cabinets to store the media and a catalog of metadata elements, about 10 to 20 million data points. Metadata, or data that describe other data (such as author and date created), make it easier to find or use an information resource.
Haka says within the next year, Michigan State Libraries plans to build gaming rooms and seek grant funds to hire more librarians to complete metadata tagging.
The entertainment company Rovi Corp. offers cloud-based discovery capabilities and solutions for interactive advertising and audience analytics.
