A second driving factor is that the conversion to digital backfiles aids faculty in the educational process. Since access to digital holdings is unlimited, it is possible to have 25, 40 or 100 students simultaneously access an article. Faculty can assign readings from journals and no longer have to develop course books. In the sciences, health related professions and education, particularly at the upper division and graduate level, access to current content is essential to providing a vital and competitive educational experience. Our current holdings are simply out of date in terms of how students and faculty expect content to be delivered. If we are to be a true 21 st Century library, a true Learning Commons accessible to all of our students and faculty, our content must conform to the current best practice or we risk losing students to other institutions that are current in terms of best practice. Another driving factor is the age of our collection, both in monographs and serials. Our serials collection continues to age, leaving us with journals broken down by age and use patterns. Often a student will go to an older back-file of a journal looking for an article and discover that the article has been removed. Unfortunately, there are students who for one reason or another rather than copying the article as would be appropriate, simply razor the article out. This destroys that back issue of the journal for future use. Additionally, high use journals suffer destruction of the binding as it is repeatedly put into a copy machine. Once the binding is broken, it is generally impossible to rebind the volume. In rebinding a volume the old binding and glue must be removed. This requires that the volume be trimmed by an inch or more, resulting in the loss of content and making the volume useless. If the volume is recent, it may be possible to procure back issues from the publisher and have a new bound volume created at a substantial cost to the library. In most cases since these are older volumes, a replacement option is unlikely. These losses are eliminated with the conversion to digital formats both for current and past volumes. A five-year plan adds increased variability around anticipated costs, since withdrawal and conversion would be accomplished based on collections. I have included such a plan as part of this document to show the variability in costs over a five-year conversion. Moreover, the costs listed on the 5-Year Acquisition Plan are based on current costs. Given the realities of the cost increases that occur annually, and assuming the least conservative increase of 7% per the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recommendations, a project costing $500,000 in FY 2019, if amortized over five years would cost $575,073. If we use ACRL’s most conservative recommendation of a 10% increase per year, the cost of the conversion could
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