Leaky roof

We have a potential disaster on our hands: part of our roof is
needing to be replaced and it is leaky in a random way. We have not
had any significant rain in over 3 weeks, since we discovered the
severity of the problem. (believe it or not, we suffered no weather
from Hurricane Bonnie).  Our campus administrators promise a new
roof in 90 days possibly, but in the meantime, we are planning for
problems. If this roof is not fixed by winter, we may be in for
serious problems, since it is flat and we are in a major snow
region.

We are worried about water damage to books in our general stacks and
we are also worried about mold blooms in the ceiling tiles and crawl
space above the ceiling.  In preparation we have covered the
affected areas with 4 mil. plastic which drapes about halfway down
each range; patrons can fairly easily lift the plastic to get to
books.

There are so far no obvious (blue) mold  outbreaks, and our stacks
have a relative humidity that is low most of the time anyway (in
fact, usually we are too dry), but one column near a window has a
weird white fungus imbedded in the wood panelling and we think we
should replace this. No books are showing mold at this point.

We are working on disaster contingencies. We've contacted SOLINET
and several companies that specialize in moisture control. We feel
fortunate that we can kind of "plan" for this--but I have a couple
of questions for the experts:

    1.  In identifying local freezer spaces in the event of really
        wet books, we are running up against possible Health Dept.
        restrictions concerning placing non-food items in commercial
        food freezer space. How should we handle this? Boone is a
        small town with not much cold storage other than food
        freezers. Disaster mitigation companies say they will bring
        their trucks but they cannot get here immediately since we
        are remote. We are thinking of asking staff with home
        freezers to "adopt" books if necessary.

    2.  Our Physical plant people say that the style of ceiling
        tiles we have are not replacable (ie, no longer made). But
        we would rather have the water-damaged ones removed and
        something else put up in place of them, regardless of what
        they look like. We want to remove the waterlogged tiles
        because of the possibility of mold. Any suggestion on how to
        deal with this? If the holes are left open, all the heat
        rises in the winter, and that causes problems with HVAC
        system.

Eleanor I. Cook
Serials Specialist
(and Preservation Specialist)
Belk Library, PO Box 32026
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608-2026
828-262-2786
Fax: 828-262-2773

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 12:24
                Distributed: Thursday, September 3, 1998
                       Message Id: cdl-12-24-003
                                  ***