Teams of editors, archivists, and librarians 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 the project's notes.

Reseachers can create and organize their notes as they wish. Notes can be organized around documentary sources or thematically organized around topics—or both. To find notes, users can browse by topic, search the full text of notes, and filter results using bibliographic metadata.

Editors' Notes is integrated with the Zotero citation management software. Researchers can use Zotero to collect documents and then use Editors' Notes to take notes on those documents. Document descriptions can be edited in Editors' Notes and saved back to Zotero.

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.