Media: Rovi Donates Nearly One Million CDs, Blu-Rays, DVDs, and Video Games to Michigan State University Libraries

Rovi is a major global provider of entertainment related metadata (program guides), personalization, analytics, etc.)
They also provide the useful AllMusic and AllMovies online reference sites.
As you’ll read below, the donation also included metadata for each item, more than 20 million data points.
From a News Release:

Rovi Corporation and Michigan State University (MSU) [recently] announced that Rovi has donated a rare and valuable media collection to MSU.
This donation establishes the largest media collection held by a library in the United States. The new “Rovi Media Collection” is comprised of close to one million CDs, Blu-Rays, DVDs, and video games, and is now publicly available through the MSU library and interlibrary loan services.
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“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.”
The archive consists of CDs that have been commercially available in the U.S. as well as a significant percentage of releases imported from Europe. The DVD collection, which was started the year DVDs were introduced to the market, similarly represents the vast majority of commercially released DVDs in the U.S. The games archive focuses primarily on console games and PC games, beginning in 1999, and includes a number of titles that date back to the early 80s.
[Our emphasis] The “Rovi Media Collection” also includes a catalog of metadata elements consisting of nearly 20 million data points.

Read the Complete Announcement

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