Back in 1977 I went into the Service and was stationed in Germany. I had maybe 750 records at the time which I was going to put into storage, along with a bunch of antiques and other belongings. My sister insisted I store the stuff down her basement, a no cost option, so I did. While I was away for three years, unbeknownst to me, a hose on their washer burst and flooded their basement, soaking about two hundred of the records in the bottom two stacked orange crates.
Nothing was done to inform me, dry the record jackets out, or remove the vinyl from the jackets. So you can imagine what these records looked like a year or two after the fact, when I got home after finishing my tour of duty. The antique furniture was a complete loss and he jackets and their inner sleeves were moldy and disgusting to say the least.
But miraculously, as a fledgling audiophile, as I purchased each record new, I had replaced almost all the original paper jackets with vinyl lined paper inner sleeves . So most of the records themselves within the sleeve's plastic liner were dry and okay, although the jackets and paper portion of the sleeves were goners. Only one record was a complete loss, the old Buddy Holly "Reminiscing" LP which was in it’s original paper inner jacket.
For years, whenever shopping at antique stores, flea markets, garage sales or wherever, I always scoured the used record bins to find original replacement jackets. Drove my late wife crazy. Forty- seven years later, this past Winter I finally gave up and purchased eighty plain white jackets to finally get the remaining records back on the shelves where they belonged.
So my advice to you is try to save your records. It’s greatly satisfying to do so, even almost half a century later. The white outer jackets can be found relatively inexpensively in bulk online if you look around. I’ve about twenty left over you can have if you live anywhere near Roanoke, VA. An ultrasonic or any good cleaner would be a great thing to have in any event. Wish I had one. Take it easy.
Mike
