One particular feature stands out for the graduate assistant drudge. BookWhere? 2000 will save and export selected library records in many popular bibliographic database manager formats. If you use ProCite, Reference Manager 7, or Reference Manager 8, BookWhere? 2000's Fast Export feature will save records directly into your bibliographic database manager. If you use Citation 7, Refer, InMagic, or Nota Bene's Ibid, the ordinary File Export feature will save your searches in importable formats for any one of them. Records from subsequent searches can be appended to previous searches, so there is no need to create a separate export file for each search. In addition, BookWhere? 2000 will save records MARC format, plain text format, and tab-delimited text format. Generating a bibliography from records found by BookWhere? 2000 is as easy as your bibliographic database manager allows: in testing this software, I generated a fully MLA-formatted bibliography of the 400-odd volumes of the University of Alberta holdings of the Early English Text Society series in less than fifteen minutes from dial-up to completion.

Choosing which libraries to search from a very long list is not as onerous as its sounds. BookWhere? 2000 allows you to create button dialogue boxes of your favourite libraries, and to create groups of favourite libraries. BookWhere? 2000 also saves a list of the last ten libraries searched, and the last ten search strings. An entire search session configuration can also be saved to disk in case you need to repeat it.

Installation is handled by a Windows Setup Wizard and is not complicated by any other installation options besides the folder you choose to install in. Custom configuration options include: whether to start a new session or revert to a previous session on start-up; search timeouts, idle time, and number of records allowed per session; display and printer fonts; system and saved file locations; rules for fields to display in all three panes; adding, deleting, and testing hosts and databases; sort order of retrieved records; and, fields to use in MARC displays. If your work does not require you to search routinely on authors, titles, subjects, or keywords, it is also possible to configure the Power search dialogue box buttons to include any four of the allowable Z39.50 data fields.

Lastly, BookWhere? 2000 allows you to toggle between the main display window and a record of all the transactions between the software and the library catalogue. If you suddenly find yourself saying, "Hey! Wait a minute! What do you mean the Library of Congress has nothing on Shakespeare?" you can toggle to the transactions window to find out if the library is down or busy.

Of the handful of Z39.50 clients currently available, none is so feature-rich as BookWhere? 2000. The built-in Z39.50 client in EndNote Plus may be more transparent for the user, but it lacks the more elaborate features of BookWhere? 2000. About the only feature BookWhere? 2000 does not have, compared to other clients, is multi-lingual support: this is English-only software. (Note: For a comparative review, please see the BiblioTech Review website. The review is somewhat out of date because most of the missing features, especially the question of how to handle variants on the Z39.50 protocol, have since been corrected in the current version of BookWhere? 2000.)

If, however, you are doing a lot of online library research, or if you want your graduate assistant to play a more collaborative role in your research project, or if your department didn’t give you an assistant, or if you are an assistant with a private income, or if you are simply a librarian without other resources, BookWhere? 2000 is well worth considering. If nothing else, BookWhere? 2000 ought to be part of the essential tool kit of any humanities computing lab.