Introduction to Nota Bene

You have probably never heard of software applications other than the ones considered to be "market leaders" which are, in all probability, the ones you use. There are plenty of good reasons for this and there is plenty of evidence coming from behavioral science experiments that explain your particular use of computer applications. Part of the reason - actually a great deal of it - has less to do with capabilities suited to needs than to marketing. In other words, the best applications do not always get to be market leaders. But all greatly marketed applications do.

Nota Bene, TEK, Dreamweaver, Eudora, Pegasus, Star Office . . . these and other applications are regarded by professionals to be "the best of breed" - at the top of their respective fields. However, only the specialists know this and use them. You are about to join the ranks of those around the world who use Nota Bene (NB), the suite of applications designed for students and faculty for their academic research, writing, bibliographic database management, and non-bibliographic database management.

NB consist of four applications:

• Nota Bene, the word processor
• Orbis, the hypertext search and retrieval application
• Ibidem, the bibliographic database manager
• Ibid Plus, the non-bibliographic database manager

Orbis, Ibidem and - via Ibidem - Ibid Plus can each be accessed by clicking on their respective icons on the Nota Bene screen (as your mouse pointer hovers over the icons, each will tell you what it is for). These applications share the same interface and work seamlessly with each other.

How to represent what Nota Bene does? Perhaps the best way to create an impression in your mind of what NBW accomplishes is to ask you to imagine yourself in the following scenario:

You are sitting at your desk, writing a paper. The digital equivalent is writing on screen in the word-processing application of NB: all the layout rules of the manual of style are automatically in operation. You are then looking for some notes you wrote down and which you need to refer to for possible incorporation into the paper. The digital equivalent is Orbis - and you don't need to recall any names of files, just enter the search words and click to find your notes about them. You find your notes and now you wish to cite the bibliographic reference according to the capitalization and punctuation rules of the Chicago Manual of Style. The equivalent is Ibidem: just click and the citation is done according to the rules.

For an introduction to the academic word processing application in Nota Bene, click on Nbwtraining. You will also find a Web page that will introduce you to another vital application of the Nota Bene suite with exceptional capacities to search and retrieve text and to find relationships suitable for qualitative analysis. This is the purpose of Nota Bene's Orbis. Finally, you will be building your personal electronic library -- sort of your own digital card catalog -- and use the bibliographic management tools provided by Nota Bene's Ibidem.

FOR USERS OF MICROSOFT WORD: a brief slide presentation comparing the salient differences between Word and Nota Bene is provided on this Web site. NOTE: to view the presentation, you must use Internet Explorer. You will be taken to the presentation by clicking here.

You will benefit from reading a review of Nota Bene that appeared in the November 2000 issue of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing.