My interest in Nota Bene was sparked in the late 1980s when the program was demonstrated at the display booth that the company set up in the book exhibit hall at meetings of the American Historical Association. I recall an opened outsized book on a display stand with a sign that read “This book was produced by Nota Bene.”

Personal computers were just beginning to replace writing pads and typewriters as the preferred mechanism for writing. Early ventures had established a foothold on the market: Wordstar, WordPerfect and, lagging behind, Word. And many other small companies were contributing to this new market segment called word-processing. But if word-processing was no longer novel, what accounted for the unusual behaviors that the crowds meandering through the book exhibits demonstrated as they ambled around the Nota Bene exhibit? I remember standing a few feet away and noticing that passers-by would distance themselves slightly from the display booth, almost stretching their necks to catch a glimpse of the program as it was being demonstrated by company staff. I recall that it reminded of the scene in the movie 2001 in which the apes hesitatingly approached the obelisk. And as I came for a closer inspection, I realized why others appeared awed: this was not a word-processing program.

This was a tightly integrated compendium of programs — the term “suite” had not yet arrived on the scene — operating under a common interface that fulfilled all the components of research and writing. In a way, word-processing an academic document was not the most salient feature but represented instead the activity resulting from previous ground-level tasks: gathering of data in the traditional manner of taking notes and accumulating bibliographic and archival sources from which the data were culled. The integration of all data, in the form of content and references, made the culminating act of writing a pleasure. The fact that, in the process of writing the academic documents, they were automatically formatted to suit any of the major academic style manuals including page layouts, references and bibliographies relieved an enormous amount of pressure, leaving writers all the time and needed mental space for the task of creating. No wonder the crowds appeared puzzled. So much power, so much speed, so much automation were available only through the use of Nota Bene. Interestingly, it remains true today. Nothing on the market integrates  Orbis, the built-in database containing every word entered into Nota Bene, whether typed, scanned or converted from other formats, with Ibidem, the bibliographic management application, with Archiva, the web-centered bibliographic data harvester, and, finally, with Nota Bene, the word-processing application capable of automating a manuscript’s layout every editor would welcome for its proper format.

I find Orbis to be a most powerful tool. Orbis databases are free-form: there is no such thing as entering data. Instead, everything you write is automatically captured by Orbis and relationships among terms are presented as you need them on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. Look for “authoritarian*” and “patron*” and you will be presented with all paragraphs in which every word starting with “authoritarian” appears along with words starting with “patron.” You will also be presented with the bibliographic sources from which the notes were gathered. And if you choose to integrate those ideas into your developing document, the bibliographic references are automatically formatted in accordance to the rules required by your selected academic style manual. Difficult to imagine until your long-forgotten notes, your ideas and concepts are presented to you fresh and with contexts. There is no practical limit to Orbis databases (the program uses the term “textbases”).

Indeed, all content in the Nota Bene suite of applications is related. Any note-taking file found by Orbis has the capability to transport you to Ibidem, the application responsible for bibliographic management and specifically to the source of your notes. Once in Ibidem, you can choose to use the application in other ways. Do you want to know what bibliographic sources in your Ibidem deal with “patronage”? Search Ibidem  and be ready to be launched into Nota Bene, the word-processing component of the Nota Bene suite, to read your notes or any other document containing the desired term. You never have to look for specific file names: content is what matters in the world of NB users.

My research concentrates on the social and political history of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Argentina, and more generally, my teaching is on Latin America. Whether for my scholarly writing or for my teaching, the combination of Orbis and  Ibidem, along with Archiva, have made my Nota Bene writing an experience of riches: rich and nuanced relationships, rich and deep bibliographic data, enviably rich empirical data support, and always wrapped in accurately formatted documents. On the teaching side, in addition to helping me in lecture preparation, conceptual and bibliographic guidance given to students, especially among graduate students, has been a joy. Subject bibliographies, theoretical literature, case studies, and literature reviews have all been facilitated enormously by NB.

How could I not use Nota Bene for my research and writing? And so it has been, starting with version 3.5, that NB has been at the core of all aspects of my work, involving nearly all my books except my first (I sure could have benefitted back then), and virtually all my articles and book chapters. These days, with version 10, the power and sophistication of NB is all the greater thanks to multiple new capabilities and a brand new interface.