Senior English major Patrick Portugal (left) and senior history major Dylan Winslow helped create UMDVD, a program that allows students to rent movies for free.

There is one thing every student requires before exams. It’s not a good night’s sleep. It’s not flawless study habits. It’s not even energy drinks.

It’s distractions.

And, as if students needed another reason to skip study sessions, the university is welcoming a new DVD rental program just in time for finals.

Since last spring, seniors Dylan Winslow, a history major, and Patrick Portugal, an English major, have been stockpiling hundreds of movies for UMDVD — a free, library-sponsored DVD rental system that launched yesterday.

The approximately 600 DVDs, now on the shelves of Hornbake Library’s Nonprint Media Services, range from the American Film Institute’s Top 100 to anime features to full seasons of television shows, courtesy of about $7,000 in funding from the Student Government Association, the Graduate Student Government and other student groups.

By next semester, Winslow said the collection should be 1,000 titles strong, and the pair hopes to double that number by next fall. Eventually, they aim to grow UMDVD into one of the largest, most diverse DVD libraries in the country, Portugal said.

“It’s pretty remarkable what we did in a matter of months,” Winslow said. “We just created it out of thin air.”

With the new system, modeled after a DVD rental program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, students have access to movies for three days at a time with a penalty of $5 for each day the movie is overdue.

The UMDVD founders have been spending their funds frugally by buying mainly used DVDs from outlets such as CDepot. They took input from various student groups to decide which titles to include, and some clubs have donated their own movies to the collection, too.

“It just evolved into this incredible initiative, not only with entertainment purposes, but with academic purposes, as well,” Winslow said.

Now that they have turned over their DVDs to the library system, Winslow and Portugal said they hope UMDVD will become a student group of film enthusiasts, whose members would discuss movies amongst themselves, arrange for a lecture series on films and lobby for the university to reinstate a film studies program.

The concept began as Winslow’s service initiative in the SGA, where he served as a neighboring commuter legislator last year.

When he transferred to this university, Winslow said, he was surprised there was no widespread DVD rental system in place.

Nonprint Media Services had a smaller DVD collection that instructors and some students could check out for academic purposes, a collection that is merging with the program.

A free DVD checkout program already available at most dorms will remain separate from UMDVD, but Winslow said is confident there is room for both. UMDVD offers a wider selection of titles and is accessible to all students, faculty and staff, whereas the dorm rentals have fewer movies to offer and are limited to each building’s residents.

“It’d be great to be able to take stuff back from Hornbake” instead of watching movies for class at specific times in the library, said Sarah Singer, a sophomore English and women’s studies major.

But not all students were convinced UMDVD is the more convenient option.

“I don’t know if I’d walk all the way to Hornbake for that,” said sophomore anthropology major Ryan Elza.

“There are so many other ways of getting movies, like online,” said sophomore Miriam Thorne. “It’s a convenience thing.”

As Hornbake combined its existing DVD collection with the new titles, Libraries Dean Patricia Steele said she was glad to see the libraries thinking outside traditional boundaries and expanding to meet student needs.

“It’s a new way of thinking for libraries,” Steele said.

“In the past, nonprint media has been a lot harder to get, harder to manage.”

UMDVD secured its first funding last spring when the SGA approved $4,500 out of its legislative reserve. The GSG contributed $1,500, and various other student groups collectively chipped in about another $1,000.

meehan at umdbk dot com