About 600,000 books belonging to the University of Missouri's library were damaged by mold at an off-campus storage site, The Associated Press reported.

The mold-covered books were discovered in October at Subtera, a 27,000 square foot underground storage site in north Columbia, Jim Cogswell, director of University of Missouri Libraries, told The Columbia Tribune.

An on-campus environmental health and safety officer has released a report last week identifying the mold as aspergillus and/or penicillium - common molds that do not pose a health threat.

Cogswell said he expects fewer than half of the books will be salvaged because it would cost $3 per volume to remove the mold. If all 600,000 volumes were clean the tab would be $1.8 million. 

Cogswell said the university does not have that much money.

"We don't have that," Cogswell said. "We have a self-insurance fund, but there is around three-quarters of a million dollars in there."

The University of Missouri puts $100,000 each year into the fund, which was created about eight years ago.  In the past five years, the school has experienced two mold invasions in on-campus collections which cost $100,000 to fix.

 The university library has stored books in the Subtera location as well as another facility for six years because the main library ran out of space, the Associated Press reported.

"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."

When the books are cleaned, they will be moved to a new facility and some books will be stored in the university's Library Depository, The Columbia Tribune reported.