There is a chronic shortage of veterinarians around the country, and in a state with no vet school this shortage is even worse. The obvious home for a much-needed new School of Veterinary Medicine was the R-1 public land-grant university that already offered a veterinary science program for undergraduate and graduate students. As the current liaison for that program, I was asked to be involved in preparing the libraries for this new addition to our university. I benchmarked our collections and services that could potentially support veterinary medicine against our peer institutions with a vet school and produced a report that offered purchasing recommendations to effectively support a veterinary medicine program. This report included plans for hiring necessary personnel, options for library space usage, and a projected budget for the electronic resources, books, and journals we would need to purchase. I will share how I managed the project, what information I used for benchmarking, software and tools used, and I will offer a framework for future benchmarking projects that could potentially be used for any new program. I will also address the importance of open communication between the libraries and the administration for a new program as it relates to program accreditation. The subject of the library’s role in accreditation for the new School of Veterinary Medicine, as well as the timeline, was something I had to initiate conversations about in order to make hiring and acquisitions plans to meet those accreditation requirements by certain deadlines. This timeline begins years before the first student is accepted, and may not be on the library’s radar when they are asked to branch out into a new program dependent on accreditation, but is certainly an important aspect all librarians need to be aware of.