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CLIO Year 2000 Status Report

Last revision: 01/04/00 04:53:01 PM
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All CLIO system functions are operating normally as of January 2, 2000. The system is in full production and experienced no Year 2000 related difficulties. Further testing and monitoring will occur on an ongoing basis around future critical rollover dates such as February 29, 2000.

What follows is an historical account of CLIO Year 2000 preparations.


SUMMARY: Columbia's CLIO/NOTIS system is expected to be fully Year-2000 compliant before the end of calendar year 1998 according to Ameritech Library Services, the vendor that currently distributes and supports the software. At Columbia the system already routinely handles dates beyond 1999 in both online and batch processing. Based on vendor certification and our own application-side testing, we consider it unlikely that CLIO/NOTIS will have significant Y2000 problems so long as a) AcIS is able to make required MVS and CICS upgrades according to its planned schedule, and b) the vendor's certification and testing prove to have been accurate.


  1. APPLICATION NAME/TYPE: CLIO (Columbia Libraries Information Online) is the name for Columbia's implementation of the Ameritech Library Services' NOTIS Library Management System (LMS). Columbia Libraries licenses the NOTIS software package from Ameritech; we have made only a limited number local customizations, none of which include date processing. Over 100 other major university and research libraries, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton and Michigan, continue to rely on the NOTIS LMS.

  2. DESCRIPTION: CU's NOTIS system runs chiefly on the CUVMB virtual machine on the central university mainframe (an IBM Enterprise Server 9672, Model R24). The operating environment is CICS/MVS; the mainframe portion of the application is written largely in BAL with some SAS and PL/1. The IBM mainframe is managed by Administrative Information Services (AIS); the CUVMB partition and operating environment is managed by Academic Information Systems (AcIS). The Libraries' Systems Office (LSO) is responsible for running the NOTIS application itself.

    NOTIS is a large and complex application that supports a number of mission-critical operations and services within the Libraries and campus-wide, including: library materials ordering, receipt and fund accounting; journal check-in; book circulation; staff cataloging operations; and the patron-access online catalog. Parts of the NOTIS software were orignally written some 20 years old at Northwestern University where the software originated; other modules have been completely rewritten in the past 10 years by Ameritech Library Systems and its predecessor vendor "NOTIS Systems Inc."

    In addition to the mainframe portion of the application, several smaller distributed components of the system ("TAG", "New GTO," and "WebPAC") run on IBM RS6000 servers running AIX 4.1 or 4.3. The two TAG servers are channel-connected to the IBM mainframe and housed in the computer center; other servers are physically located in LSO (currently 507 Butler Library).

    One additional component of the system ("Old GTO") runs on several older DOS PC-based baser servers located in Library work areas.

  3. CURRENT STATUS: The mainframe portion of the NOTIS application is said by the vendor to be essentially 99% Year-2000-compliant at the Release 6.4.1 level and 100% compliant at the Release 6.5 level. Columbia currently runs NOTIS at the 6.4.1 level. Release 6.5 was delivered in July 1998 and is scheduled to be installed at Columbia before December 1998.

    (Information about the current mainframe operating environment is available from Bob Resnikof and/or Vace Kundakci (AcIS). LSO's current understanding is that AcIS must upgrade both CICS and MVS in order to achieve full Year 2000 Compliance, and that these upgrades are now in the planning stages.)

    The NOTIS TAG, New GTO and WebPac applications are confirmed by Ameritech to be Year 2000 compliant. Both the RS6000 hardware and the AIX versions have been confirmed Y2000 compliant by IBM.

    The Old GTO software is confirmed by Ameritech to be Year 2000 compliant; the hardware (IBM PS/2) on which it runs and the OS (DOS 5.0) have preliminarily been determined to be Y2000 compliant, but will undergo further testing.

  4. VENDOR COMPLIANCE DOCUMENTATION: Ameritech has provided a brief NOTIS Y2000 FAQ at:

    http://www.amlibs.com/year2000/index.htm.

  5. LOCAL YEAR 2000 TESTING OF CLIO: We have run all vendor-provided test scripts as part of the installation of release 6.4.1 (and all previous releases). We have not, however, made any systematic assessment of the comprehensiveness and efficacy of these test scripts, nor is it within the scope of our staffing and skill pool to do so.

    Because NOTIS stores dates internally in a format that has always been able to handle dates up to 2027, we have a degree of confidence that the vendor's statements re Y2000 compliance are accurate. Locally we have already been able to input, display and process 4-digit year dates as part of our normal operation (e.g., for books expected to be published in 2000 or byond, for journals that have subscription dates beyond 2000, etc.)

Last revision: 01/04/00
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