Liz Fair knows a little about record storage and archiving. As the Mercer County prothonotary, she oversees a department that in an average year delivers 100 boxes of records to the basement of Woodland Place, where they are stored.

Records -- some paper, some on microfilm and some done by new imaging procedures -- from every county department are kept at the Coolspring Township nursing home that was sold to a non-profit board, created in part with assistance from Mercer County commissioners, to run the home in 1998.

Thursday, Mrs. Fair told commissioners she has some concerns about the well-being of those records, some that date to the 19th century, because of damp and musty conditions in the basement that have only been worsened by an extremely wet summer.

Mrs. Fair said the walls are seeping at ground level, allowing water and a little mud to find its way into the area where the records are stored. She asked commissioners if their intent was to keep them there, then something should be done to ensure the safety of those records.

"There's no danger to the records," Chairman Cloyd E. "Gene" Brenneman said.