The point of this article is to give an idea of what costs go with long-term maintenance of digital collections. Libraries have moved most access to materials from print to electronic. Understanding maintenance costs, as opposed to initial costs to build a digital library, helps to understand long-term implications of the shift. This article is heavily academic oriented, because academic and state libraries/archives have traditionally kept long-term historic materials. With print materials, storage costs are visceral. We can see and feel linear feet on the shelf. Rent and air conditioning are things we pay for ourselves in daily life and which must be paid on a storage facility. However, digital materials conceal costs. Home photos taken by phone may be the closest we come in daily life to understanding issues involved in long-term maintenance of digital objects.