In 2015, the Michigan State University Libraries acquired the Rovi Media Collection, consisting of more than 800,000 CDs, DVDs and video games. Accepting this transformative collection entailed a commitment to make it accessible to residents of the State of Michigan through our statewide network as well as to the larger scholarly community. This commitment coheres with MSU's land grant mission, but the sheer size of the collection, and the diversity of the materials within it, has challenged us in a number of ways.
While most libraries have curated small multimedia collections over many years, Rovi has instantly increased our holdings over 26 times (from 30,000 to over 800,000). This raises technical and logistical challenges, particularly for metadata and description, circulation, and physical processing of materials that are starkly different from the majority of our collections. In addition, assumptions about use patterns, accessibility and workflows have all been challenged. As our goal is to make this collection more widely available, we grapple with the reality of suddenly having a collection so large and so popular that we risk our ability to provide services to our primary user community, our university, in order to meet the demand of the public and the greater research community.
This conversation will seek to explore how large scale collection changes can or should transform fundamental roles and core functions of academic libraries. What sacrifices should we make to provide unique, non-traditional library materials in a traditional academic space?
