Rovi and Michigan State University Establish Largest US Library Media Collection (marketwatch.com) 22
New submitter dbosman writes: A donation from Rovi Corp. announced Monday is bringing a gigantic media collection to Michigan State University that includes more than 850,000 CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays and video games. “We are honored to be the proprietors of the largest media archive in the country, which has quickly become the most requested material in the Michigan inter-library loan system,” said Clifford H. Haka, director of libraries, Michigan State University. “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. Assembling a collection of such cultural and historic importance and overall magnitude would simply not have been feasible with our current budget. On behalf of all of our users at MSU and across Michigan, we thank Rovi for this generous gift.”
I hope they paid for (Score:2)
all those CDs and DVDs.
From the company formerly known as Macrovision (Score:1)
all those CDs and DVDs.
Don't worry. MSU got it from the Trojan horse's mouth. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], this is the company that built its empire on preventing the easy archival of the material they have now donated:
Re: (Score:2)
I used to check out music CDs from the local library frequently, about fifteen years ago. I asked if they were concerned about them going missing, and found out that almost all of them came from the personal collections of the librarians -- who had first made CD-R copies for themselves on a machine owned by the library. (At this time CD burners were expensive but not exorbitant -- like $200, and $1 discs could be had in quantity). I would hazard a guess that most libraries do the same, even if they don't bo
Re: (Score:2)
How do you know you're on SlashDot?
Stories about how someone made a friend in meatspace get modded up.
Rovi cost cutting? (Score:2)
I wondered how long they'd keep all that, now we see they've found somebody to pay for the storage. Rovi's only interested in the metadata about those discs. They've been desperately trying to cut costs since Fred Amoroso left a few years ago and the current CEO went on an anti-product purge and focused on patent trolling, which went abysmally in some places (see Rovi vs. Virgin Media in UK).
Borrowing DVDs from Libraries (Score:2)
Libraries are often overlooked as a place to borrow DVDs from. While your local library isn't going to have the selection of MSU, it might have a respectable selection of DVDs to choose from. We make frequent trips to the library to take out DVDs along with our books. Best of all, it's free. Well, "essentially free." You pay for it via your taxes whether you use it or not.
Physical media? (Score:1)
So it's all physical media? That's so 1999.
mac ROVI sion (Score:1)
MSU also has the largest comic book collection... (Score:2)
We regret to announce... (Score:2)
Congratulations - now embrace the bit rot. (Score:2)
I've got a rather large media collection myself, I won't pretend it's as big as theirs, but it's large, I tend to buy bargain bin movies at Big Lots and other places, and I also buy new releases I actually want to see.
I've run into lots of bit-rot, especially on Warner Brothers releases - I've emailed them about it and they won't even give me the courtesy of a "go fuck yourself" reply.
Take this Blu-Ray of A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas" [blu-ray.com] for instance. It is unique in my collection as a single disk has bo
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly in a closet in an air-conditioned and heated apartment. I use big Case Logic cases for the most part so as to not have to dedicate a bedroom to the collection.
I do tend to like it closer to outside temps. In the summer I tended to have my thermostat on 80 when I was home, maybe 85-90 when not to save power. In the winter I may have it at 60 when I was home and 50 when not, temperature may have been a factor. I don't consider those temps too extreme for optical disks, but crappy ones may disagree.