Welcome to the NB documentation page.

Collaboratively annotate your PDF readings online.

• What's New
• Tutorial
• FAQ
• Disclaimer

Visit NB site

About NB

NB is an annotation taking tool developed by the Haystack Group at CSAIL. Students and Faculty can use NB to annotate arbitrary PDF files online, in a collaborative fashion. Visit NB site

What's new ?

March, 8 2009

New layout for NB (beta version) at http://nb.csail.mit.edu/?t=p11. It uses a window manager metaphor, that lets you minimize all the stuff you don't need when annotating a PDF. To restore a minimized window, just click on that wondow title in the taskbar It has that zoom in and zoom out feature many people have asked me Some basic filters have been implemented so you can only select those notes that you want to see. Please keep in mind this is still beta. Some features haven't been implemented yet (such as marking some notes as "helpful", but I'm working on it) and I haven't had time to try it as much as the regular UI.

Tutorials

• A Short Tutorial to NB (in progress)

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

• How can I see and navigate through all my notes ?
  Try our Collage Interface
• My notes don't show up ! What's wrong ?
  Did you check the option in the PDF Viewer window ?
• Can NB annotate anything besides PDFs ?
  No. NB is meant at annotating PDFs. Fortunately, many files can be converted to PDFs nowadays, using commands like Export to PDF or simply Print... If you're interested in annotating arbitrary websites, you can try The Tutor
• Did the staff really receive the Reading Memo I just typed in ?
  Yes, as long it it appears as an assignment, the staff will be able to see it
• I have a question. Who can I ask ?
  You can email Sacha: sacha (at) csail (dot) mit (dot) edu
• I like/dislike such and such feature - I'd like a new feature to be implemented. Does anyone care ?
  We DO care a lot about your impressions and your feedback will tremendously help. Please send your comments to Sacha: sacha (at) csail (dot) mit (dot) edu
• Is my information secure ? What gets stored where ? What about privacy ?
  
  • NB stores your annotations on a SQL database located on campus.
  • NB doesn't know your real name, it only knows your username which is the email address where you received your NB invitation, and that you use to login on NB
  • The following summarizes the privacy settings for your notes:
    • Your Open Comments can be seen by both students and staff. However, they can't see your username (unless they report a misuse of the site to the NB admins). If you want your identity to appear, you need to sign your comment.
    • Your Reading Assignments can be seen by the staff along with your email. If the staff decides that your assignment would complement the readings in a way that benefits the whole class, they can make it a Public Assignment, so that the students can also see it, and comment on it. However, students do not see your email.
    • Your Private notes are... private: Staff and other students can't see them
• Do you plan on using all those annotations for anything ?
  Yes, After the term is over, we would like to be able to extracting statistics from the annotations that have been entered during the term, as part of our ongoing research, to improve NB and understand better the features users need, like and dislike. Of course, all the data we may end up publishing will preserve the author's anonymity, in be in accordance with the COUHES rules.

Disclaimer

NB has been designed with the academic community in mind, it uses no encryption, doesn't try too hard to protect itself from malicious users, stores cookies on your computer for quite a long time (unless you log out)... To summarize, don't put confidential information on NB !

NB is a research project and we can't provide any kind of warranty including, but not limited to the availability of the service, the confidentiality of your annotations, the vulnerability of NB to computer attacks etc...