Chorus wishes to stress that we do not consider these to be complaints so much as a registry of our hopes for future versions. We'd like to note that few of the other bibliographical software database programs address more than 4 or 5 of the concerns below.

New features that would not require new software programmming:

1. Key styles to journal and disciplinary expectations: At present, Niles ships the following Humanities styles: Chicago A, Chicago B, Chicago Notes, MLA, MLA Notes, Turabian Bibliography, Turabian Numbered, and Turabian Reference List. There should be, however, style sheets for major journals and disciplines just as are listed for, say, Substance Abuse (Journal of Addictive Diseases; Journal of Psychoactive Drugs; Alcohol and Alcoholism; etc.). We need disciplinary folders for History, Literature, Philosophy, etc., containing styles for the major disciplinary journals. (In particular, the lack of a style for the American Historical Association / American Historical Review--which is much like the Chicago style without specifying a publisher--is a serious lack.) This is a place where EndNote customers might collect some information: Which journals, for instance, require the Chicago, MLA, or AHA styles?
2. Better supplied styles: The default fields for reference types might be expanded. In particular, we need a standard field for the month/season of a journal issue. Many users put this field on the generic "date" field--but in the interests of trading libraries with the assumption that data is in the correct place, we need a standard. EndLINK and the new Z39.50 filters should save this data to the appropriate field. Finally, a style should be able to suppress the inclusion of month/season information if the issue is "old," or add issue information only if the journal issue is paginated separately (such information might be stored in the journals abbreviation list). Beyond this, it would be helpful for EndNote to know about two additional pieces of information for books: (1) Original publication information for books that are not reprints (in historical fields, one occasional lists at least the original date of publication for a novel such as David Copperfield); (2) original publication data for reprints. (In my personal database I've put original publication data into the Custom 1 field, and original publication data for reprints in Custom 3.) Thus we might find formatted entries like the following:

   Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. New York: Harper & Row, 1931; reprint, New York: Perennial, 1964. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. 1954. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. 1963. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. 1973; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

   Besides original publication data for books, EndNote might provide for the original publication data for essays that are collected into Edited Books (I put original publication data for essays in Custom 4).

   Beyond these additional fields, EndNote needs to support book reviews. It may be that adding a "Reviewed Item" field to the "Journal Article" style might be enough (I put "Reviewed Item" information in Custom 2). In any case, EndNote should be able to produce formatted references like these book reviews (with and without titles): Howard Felperin, "Canonical Texts and Non-Canonical Interpretations: The New Historicist Reading of Donne," review of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), by Arthur Marotti, Southern Review 18 (1985): 235-250; Arthur F. Marotti, review of Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), by Harold Love, Modern Philology 93, no. 3 (February 1996): 381-387.

3. Online help: Data-entry formats for field values should be defined; ideally, pressing F1 while entering a field would bring up the help for that field. For example, for an edition, does one include "ed." or not? How do you enter "Jr."? The help file should provide information on such questions.
4. Sample reference library keyed to page numbers in most popular styles: It would be very helpful for scholars in the Humanities if the supplied sample reference library contained entries from the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook, with item numbers in the keywords. This would also be a good check that EndNote can actually format some of the more complicated references.

1. Diacritics / accents / "foreign" characters: Pity the poor scholar who must type many, many references in French or another language with lots of diacritics. The EndNote manual recommends using the Windows Character Map accessory, or entering the ANSI codes on the Windows keypad. Both of these solutions are awkward. Ideally, there'd be two solutions: (1) A helper application that would present a grid of diacritics; clicking on one would send that diacritic to EndNote; (2) Key sequences for the most important European accented characters.
2. More fields: This problem is severely affecting some scholars and researchers in the Humanities. To the issues noted above regarding publication data we might add: (1) the need to provide multiple versions of titles in different languages; and (2) the need for multiple abstracts for different readers. EndNote 3.0 adds three new fields (for web URLs, call numbers, and Accession numbers); interestingly, the new databases can be opened by the old program. This leads us to believe that there is no reason not to immediately add 4 more custom fields. Done right, Niles would specify conventional values for such fields so that those of us who need to add translated titles do it in the same custom field.
3. Save searches and sorts: There are two issues here--how such a feature would be used, and an appropriate interface design for such uses. My bet is that most humanists want to save searches and sorts so that they can quickly revisit the (changing) bibliography for a project or a class. This leads me to think that it might be enough to save the last 10 searches and sorts and keep them on the menu. Were searches and sorts to be saved by name, a drop-down list of such "saves" would ideally be placed right in the search and sort dialogue boxes.
4. Better formatting of temporary citations that indicate page numbers for a reference: Here's the problem. Let's revisit the canonical citation example from the Chorus Review of EndNote 3.0. The original paper looks like this:

   Milton's representation of Raphael's description of the emergence of dry land is thoroughly conditioned by the philosophy of what John Rogers calls "the Vitalist Movement."1 1. See {Rogers, 1996 #5199}.

   After formatting, it would be like so:

   Milton's representation of Raphael's description of the emergence of dry land is thoroughly conditioned by the philosophy of what John Rogers calls "the Vitalist Movement."1 1. See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).

   But now what if I want to give a precise page number? How would I do that? This is harder than it looks. Suppose my EndNote reference for Rogers wasn't to the entire book, but to a chapter? Well, the chapter part is easy enough: I'd just enter the chapter as a "Book Section." Yet what if I want to reference a specific page number or range? In this case, I'd like to cite John Rogers, "Chaos, Creation, and the Political Science of Paradise Lost," in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 103-143, but only pages 114-115. I'd like my original temporary citation to look something like this (Note: the current EndNote provision for "suffix text" is inadequate since the author must know in advance the publication style [i.e., whether one should say "p." or nothing]):

   Milton's representation of Raphael's description of the emergence of dry land is thoroughly conditioned by the philosophy of what John Rogers calls "the Vitalist Movement."1 1. See {Rogers, 1996 #5199 @114-115}.

   After formatting, wouldn't this be nice?:

   Milton's representation of Raphael's description of the emergence of dry land is thoroughly conditioned by the philosophy of what John Rogers calls "the Vitalist Movement."1 1. See John Rogers, "Chaos, Creation, and the Political Science of Paradise Lost," in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 114-115.

   Naturally, if my temporary citation had left out a narrower range of pages, I'd want the entire chapter to be cited with the page numbers (103-143) from the library. And there are times with I might want both (Example: See John Rogers, "Chaos, Creation, and the Political Science of Paradise Lost," in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 103-143, at 114-115).

5. "Live" display of a formatted reference: It would be very helpful if a box displayed a formatted version of whatever references were selected in a reference library. Perhaps the box that now displayed "Showing 5,257 out of 5,257 references" might display a scrolling textbox of formatted versions of whatever is currently selected.
6. Spell-checking: As users have made more extensive use of EndNote for storing abstracts and other notes, spell-checking has become more important. Perhaps the spell-checking might be done on EndNote's behalf through communication with Word or WordPerfect? A complete solution would also provide for spell-checking in foreign languages.
7. Change displayed columns: This has been much-requested. My bet is that a dialogue-based interface for changing columns is not necessary--users who need this feature would probably be satisfied with editing a text .ini file of some kind. Perhaps columns might be headed with titles, which when clicked would sort according to that field (shift-click might sort in reverse order).
8. Conditional formatting; ability to define certain problematic style issues: In some cases, style-writers need to be able to reverse the normal dependency rules--in particular, a non-null field value sometimes needs to prevent the following text from being displayed.
9. Format of page numbers depends on style: For page numbers, the database includes the complete number for both ends of the range. Styles, however, often recommend, for example, that "in a range of numbers, give the second number in full for numbers through ninety-nine, [but] for larger numbers, give only the last two digits of the second number, unless more are necessary" (MLA Handbook, p. 64). This is the kind of inane busy-work that computers should do for us!
10. Translator field--needs to be a "name" field: Annoyingly, the translator name is not a real "name" field in EndNote. In other words, translator names may not be entered as "Last, First M." Why is this a problem? Because it means that there's a special case during data entry (for big projects, there may be helpers, researchers, student assistants--why invite them to screw up a field?).
11. Author field--Allow to be blank; sort such records on title: Many works in the Humanities are unsigned. EndNote should deal gracefully with references with no author; for such works, the title should be used for sorting.
12. Capitalization control based on style: This is chiefly a problem for those of us who publish in both the United States and in England. A given style should be able to control whether titles are displayed in sentence- or headline-style capitalization. This is easy if all titles are stored in the database as sentence-style. Then, for headline-style capitalization, all words that are not articles (the, an, etc.) get capitalization (proper names are already capitalized in sentence-style).
13. Book titles within book titles: If a book title includes the title of another book, EndNote should do something reasonable (such as unemphasize the internal title--or present it in another emphasize format).
14. Punctuation within titles: For note forms, if there is terminal punctuation in an article title (such as an exclamation point or question mark), the ending comma should be ommitted.
15. Editor and translator the same: When the editor and translator are the same, EndNote should be able to display "ed. and trans." instead of repeating the names twice.
16. Place of publication--control over inclusion of state, country, region, etc.: For "Place published," a scholar may include city, state, and country. It should be possible to (1) suppress the place published altogether if different from some standard location (e.g., New York or London) or (2) Suppress the state and/or country. This has to happen on a style-by-style basis, since the actual content of the field needs to be modified.
17. Long/short styles / subsequent citations: For note forms, we need some way for a brief version subsequent citations to the same reference.
18. Drop-down lists for field values for certain fields: Term-lists are great. But for some fields--perhaps especially keywords--it would be very helpful to have a drop-down list right on the field entry box. In the sciences, such drop-down lists seem to be most desired for author names, but I don't think this is as necessary in the humanities.
19. Support better the MLA style: The MLA style is an abomination because in-text citations depend on the structure of the sentence and on the contents of the entire bibliography. Nevertheless, there would seem to be ways that software could automatically provide correct in-text citations in some cases.