Editors' Notes is an open-source, web-based tool for recording, organizing, preserving, and opening access to research notes, built with the needs of documentary editing projects, archives, and library special collections in mind.

Projects that work closely with documents—researching, contextualizing, and ordering them—invariably produce massive amounts of thorough research notes which are too often locked away in filing cabinets or the minds of editors and curators, never to be seen by anyone. The Editors' Notes project is a collaboration between the editors of the Stanton-Anthony Papers, the Emma Goldman Papers, the Margaret Sanger Papers, and the Labadie Collection which aims to preserve those research notes in a way that makes them useful to future scholars and interested minds.

Research teams can use Editors' Notes to manage their research and note-taking. Project administrators can assign research tasks to other team members, and they can control who has permission to edit their project's notes.

Notes can be organized around documentary sources or thematically around topics (or both). Users can browse by topic, search full text, and filter using bibliographic metadata. Documents can be annotated with bibliographic metadata, topic keywords, and textual notations. Researchers can also upload scanned images of documents into the zoomable interface. Researchers can annotate specific passages in document transcripts. Annotations, like other notes, can include bibliographic metadata and topic keywords and are fully searchable. In addition to creating annotated transcripts, researchers can upload scanned images of documents, which can be viewed in a zoomable interface.

New accounts are by invitation only. Request an invitation. Editors' Notes is currently in limited beta release (Nov 10/14)