Our acquisition budgets are fairly stable. I should probably explain how our acquisition budgets work. Yes, there is cash involved. That's probably what you are talking about. However, there is also a lot of material we pay for using tax receipts. That represents perhaps $5 million, $6 million or $7 million a year, I think. This method of payment is used for most of our acquisitions.
You need to understand that acquisitions are made through digital media more and more. That means that the budget you are talking about does not cover the efforts invested into developing a trusted digital repository. That repository is increasingly becoming the way we acquire our government documents, which account for 80% of our business. We are in charge of managing government documents. Most of our efforts go into that. We are developing a trusted digital repository that will also apply to legal deposit.
So we are trying to figure out how we can acquire what is produced in Canadian society so as to be as representative as possible. Documents have not been produced in analog format for a while now; they have been produced digitally. I will give you an example. Legal deposit follows certain rules. We realized that, in order for us to obtain two copies of each publication, a certain number of copies must be produced. In the digital world, it is becoming increasingly common for people to print on demand and not reach the standard figure of 200 copies. So, we don't have those copies. We need to find digital mechanisms to collect that information on the Web or elsewhere.
Those approaches are currently going through a transformation. As for your concerns, I would like to say that we are currently developing a completely innovative method I call the “whole of society approach.” It is being developed with historians, anthropologists, archivists and librarians to try to have the best possible representation of documents produced in Canadian society.
It is completely different. We are used to archives and libraries that receive documents through editors and so on, but all that's finished. That world is still somewhat existent, and we are still a part of it as well, but that is not the direction in which society is currently headed. Everything is being produced digitally, so we need to move forward and change our approaches if we want to be able to build our archives of the future.