The state’s finance and development agency has issued a $10.08 million bond to pay for the construction of the new Five Colleges Inc. library annex in Hatfield.
MassDevelopment announced the issuance of the tax-exempt bond in a Thursday release. Construction of the 35,000-square-foot building began in September and is set to be finished in May at a total cost of $14.5 million.
The annex is being built on a 12-acre parcel off Plain Road, next to Interstate 91.
It will eventually house 2 million rarely circulating books and journals from the Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which make up the Five College consortium.
Smith College will finance the remainder of the cost, according to Five Colleges spokesman Kevin Kennedy.
Smith will begin transferring over 1 million titles to the Hatfield annex once construction is complete. Those volumes will be stored there until August 2019 as its Nielsen Library undergoes renovation.
Books and periodicals from the other four institutions will also be stored at the annex and others will continue to be stored in a former military bunker on Bare Mountain in South Amherst.
The bunker was renovated and opened as a book depository in 2002. Since then, the growing collection, which now stands at 600,000 volumes, has outgrown its space.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com