University of Missouri Libraries officials face tough choices as they consider what to do with 600,000 mold-covered books at an off-campus storage facility.

The volumes are stored at Subtera, an underground storage facility off Stadium Boulevard in north Columbia. Jim Cogswell, director of MU Libraries, said library staff discovered the mold problem in October.

An on-campus environmental health and safety officer has been studying the issue since then and last week issued a report that identified the mold as aspergillus and/or penicillium � common types of mold that don't pose a health threat, MU spokesman Christian Basi said.

A representative of Con-Agg of MO LLC, the company that operates Subtera, declined to comment this morning.

Cogswell said he can't say for sure how many books will be salvaged, but it likely will be fewer than half. The reason is that removing the mold is estimated to cost $3 a volume � for a total estimated cost of $1.8 million for all 600,000 volumes.

"We don't have that," Cogswell said.

He said the goal is to save books that were published before 1870. Cogswell said he is unsure how many books that includes.

"We don't have that kind of money" to save all the books, Cogswell said. "We have a self-insurance fund, but there is around three-quarters of a million dollars in there."

The fund was created about eight years ago, and the university puts $100,000 into it each year, he said. In the past five years, there have been two other mold blooms in on-campus collections � one in the journalism library and the other in the health science library. In total, those two cost $100,000 to fix.

The library has stored books in the affected Subtera location as well another similar facility for the past six years after the main library ran out of space, Cogswell said. After the books are cleaned, they will have to be moved to a new facility. Some books can be stored in the MU Library Depository, but staff members are not sure how many books they can accommodate there.

"We are in this predicament because we had to find a cheap alternative place to put our books in," Cogswell said. "We were required to find cheap alternatives to essentially rent storage space because our library is underfunded compared to every other library of our size."

The funding problem, Cogswell said, comes from the state's lack of support for higher education. During years past, the library had a preservation officer who was trained to take care of books and would have helped prevent this type of problem by monitoring the collections, Cogswell said. That position was cut "years back" because of the budget, he said.

Cogswell said the library has already received two bids, but it is still accepting more bids.

This article was published in the Tuesday, January 28, 2014 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Mold mars university volumes;�Problem affects 600,000 books."