Y2K on PC

[Judith Rigsby]

Margaret F. Dikel wrote:

>I'd probably check in with your campus IS/IT department to see what they
>are doing about this issue.   Funny, you hear all kinds of news about
>commercial and government projects to prepare for Y2K.   What are the >colleges and universities doing?   And what are your contingency plans >should it all go wrong?

>Margaret

I began asking those questions of our IS Department nearly three years
ago and the response was always that there were no Y2K problems and
everything was fine.  In fact, once I was even laughed at for asking the
question.  I personally checked the two computers in my office and one
was compliant and the other was not.  Both run Windows 95 (Don't you
find it interesting that MS called their products "95" and "98" rather
than "1995" and "1998"?)  The question of Y2K compliancy was once again
directed to the IS Director just a few weeks ago and the response again
was that there were no problems to be concerned with.  There is little
or no awareness of Y2K on my campus and we in the library have no
confidence that anything will work on January 1, 2000.  We have begun
discussing making some contingency plans in the event that all our
networks crash.  We seldom throw anything away and are using low-end
computers as print servers, etc.  I doubt that any of these are
compliant.  

There are numerous colleges and universities with excellent Y2K plans,
but I have found little information concerning the libraries at those
institutions.  Some have replaced or updated their library systems to be
compliant, but the problem of hardware still remains.  My question has
been why the library community has been so silent on this issue.  Are
they completely relying on the computer IT/IS departments to address the
problem?  With their track record of late project delivery, perhaps we
need to be a little more concerned.  This is one date that cannot be
pushed forward or changed.

477 days and counting,
Judith