What is included in Nota Bene Workstation?
The core applications include OPUS (the Nota Bene word processor, specialized for academic writing and research), ORBIS (search everything on your system—your work, texts given to you by colleagues, and anything you’ve captured from the web—and instantly find everything that matches your search terms), IBIDEM (build a personal bibliographic database and use it to insert properly formatted citations and generate bibliographies), RADIUS (capture web data from any page you visit in both structured and unstructured format), ARCHIVA (search on-line libraries and capture citations from sites such as JStor and Project Muse to build your Ibidem databases), and MATRIX (a database to handle non-bibliographic information with extremely powerful report formatting).
What else is available?
Archiva+ extends the web-centric research options of the built-in Archiva to build bibliographic records from ISBN numbers, including those scanned in by virtually any smartphone barcode scanner app, as well as from already-formatted bibliographies in selected styles.
Can I purchase individual applications in the Nota Bene suite?
Nota Bene’s design is based on the integration of its component applications. Unlike other suites that provide entirely unrelated programs, the interaction among the Nota Bene component programs gives the suite its exceptional strengths and operational advantages. No application would work by itself.
Does the fact that Nota Bene comes as a suite of integrated programs mean that it’s offered as a single price?
The Nota Bene Workstation, with its core applications, is sold for a single price.
Are discounts available?
Yes. Students can purchase Nota Bene Workstation at a reduced price. Full-time or part-time graduate students, undergraduate students, and seminary students all qualify. Our base price is for those who are not students — faculty, independent scholars, retired faculty, novelists, serious writers, and anyone else. We also offer group discounts. If you think that others at your institution would be interested in Nota Bene, please contact sales@notabene.com for details.
Why should I spend money on Nota Bene when I already have a word processor, and I can get other tools I need (such as Zotero) at no cost?
The simple answer is because you matter — your time matters, your career matters. You are in this for the long haul, and you deserve software that enhances your work by taking care of the mindless details so you can pursue your intellectual passions. Every artisan has tools appropriate to their trade. Nota Bene is the one indispensable tool for what you do, for who you are — there is no other suite of comprehensive, integrated tools designed for the kind of work you do, anywhere. It’s your career, after all, so doesn’t it make sense to invest in it?
At the most basic level, Nota Bene can save you so much time and tedium (simply in formatting of documents, and citations) that (even if you calculate your time at minimum wage) you’ll soon come out ahead in terms of actual cost. (Nota Bene actually is really quite affordable to begin with.) But much more importantly, the research tools in Nota Bene provide resources that can creatively shape your entire scholarly career. That’s especially true of Orbis. We hear all the time from Nota Bene users that Orbis helped them see things that they would otherwise have missed, and that they ended up writing something different from what they originally expected to because of seeing how words are used, and arguments made, in the disparate texts that Orbis brings together for them. That, as the familiar marketing adage goes, is priceless.
Does Nota Bene run on a Mac?
Yes. Nota Bene runs on Macs running the latest Mac OS, Tahoe, as well as any version starting with High Sierra (10.13), including Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia, including those with the new Apple M1 , M2, M3, etc. chips. The Mac version comes as a bundled version of Crossover and Nota Bene, with both programs installed in a single installation. For more information, see Nota Bene on Mac
Will it take time to learn how to use Nota Bene? Is it "intuitive"?
There are lots of standards in the computer software world, and Nota Bene fits right in. So yes, lots of things are “intuitive.” And even more things are just much easier. Some of these will pop out at you if you take a quick look at the videos.
But on the other hand (did we say that the person who started NB while working on his dissertation was a student of philosophy?), “intuition” is a tricky concept, not least because it suggests that we might already know everything that is important. But as teachers, your task, your passion, is to teach, that is, to get your students to encounter something new, something that they didn’t know before, something that isn’t, at least in the beginning, exactly “intuitive.” That’s an essential part of what it means to learn. And we won’t deny that there is some learning involved when using some of Nota Bene’s advanced capabilities. Again, you have guides (in the videos, in the PDF tutorials, and in the extensive on-line help manual). But what we are absolutely confident of is that even if something takes a bit of learning, it will be worth it, many times over, in terms of increased productivity and creativity over the course of your entire scholarly career.
What do I do with all the files I’ve written with Microsoft Word?
Nota Bene easily converts files from MS Word. Conversions range from a simple process of copy-and-paste to one that results in a native Nota Bene document completely devoid of the formatting “command clutter” in the original Word file. We provide a detailed video tutorial dedicated to this topic.
The current version of Nota Bene significantly extends this capability with its “Smart Document Conversion” which identifies Zotero citations in the original DOCX file, and then not only adds those items to your selected Ibidem database, but also converts those cites into Ibidem’s smart citations, automatically creating subsequent shortened forms, or “ibid.,” etc. forms, as required by your active style. In addition, a wizard-like interface lets you add Nota Bene’s advanced framework/outline structure to the document. The result is a genuinely “smart” document that gives you sophisticated control over all your work.
Will I have to deal with data from different bibliographic management programs, one for Ibidem and one for Zotero, or Ibidem and Endnote?
No, we wouldn’t do that to you: you will have a single, comprehensive bibliographic database. Ibidem has filters that import data from different programs, including Zotero, Endnote, RIS, RefWorks, Mendeley and others. We offer a video tutorial covering this topic.
My university’s graduate school office requires that theses and dissertations follow its own formatting guidelines. Are the built-in styles in Nota Bene fixed in stone?
Nota Bene’s academic styles library already includes styles required by several academic institutions. For students at other universities, we recommend selecting the University of Chicago Dissertation Style. Many graduate school offices require the UC dissertation style or slight variations.
The University of Chicago Dissertation style includes settings that meet the requirements of many graduate schools, such as a left margin of 1.5 inches and single-spaced footnotes, separated by double-spaces with superscripted numbers.
The easiest way to change some of the settings in a research document based on an academic style, for example, margins, is done by clicking on Format, Page Layout… and change values where needed. In this case, click on the right arrow to increase the left margin to 1.5 inches. And make sure to Apply the changes to the Document Default.