Y2K on PC

[James Klock]

>>I'd probably check in with your campus IS/IT department to see what they
>>are doing about this issue.
>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.  

Part of the issue here may be that your IS department is (rightly, IMHO)
focusing their efforts on the large or widely-used systems upon which many
people depend from day to day.  PCs, by and large, don't have any NEED to
care what the date and time is-- if the CMOS battery dies, the PC has no
intrinsic way of keeping track of time.  
Most PCs that fail to recognize year 2000 will actually revert on January 1
2000 to believing that it is Jan 1 1980.  There are a very few applications
which you might run on your PC which would respond badly to this, but by
and large, having your PCs report the wrong time is not a major issue.

>There are numerous colleges and universities with excellent Y2K plans,
>but I have found little information concerning the libraries at those
>institutions.

If you haven't gotten a statement from the folks who sold you your library
automation system, you may have a serious problem (yes, I realize that
there are a few "PC-based" automation systems.  Some of these may be
amoungst those very few applications that will give you problems.)  If your
library automation system is not something that your IS department normally
gets invovled in, they may not remember you when they're working on their
Y2K issues.  If you want their help, tell them specifically what your need
is ("we have this database that tracks all of the books, and we want some
help figuring out if it will break", not "hey guys, are we going to have a
problem with our systems, which I will not specify in this sentence so as
to ensure that you don't know which systems I'm talking about...")

James