Archival Research Studio
Where scattered marginalia become permanent scholarship.
Capture primary sources, weave bidirectional citations, and compose long-form manuscripts inside a distraction-free archival vault.
Built for ten-year inquiries, not ephemeral sticky notes.
Every note in Vellum preserves context, provenance, and bidirectional lineage from first excerpt to published monograph.
Margin-First Annotation
Write commentary directly alongside primary texts. Every marginal note remains anchored to the exact paragraph it critiques, even as your draft evolves.
0.4 ms
Citation graph lookup across 50,000 folios
100%
Offline plain-text archival longevity
Provenance & Shelfmark Tracking
Attach archive box numbers, repository call numbers, and high-resolution plate scans to every note automatically.
Genealogical Backlink Trees
Trace how an empirical observation from three years ago matured into a central thesis paragraph today.
Cited in Chapter IV: Spatial Memory in Early Print Culture
Apparatus Criticus Export
Export clean manuscripts to LaTeX, DOCX, or print-ready PDF with footnotes, bibliography, and primary source indices intact.
Interactive Citation Workbench
Query your folios and catalog new marginalia live.
Search sample archival notes below, verify cross-references, or append a new source entry to experience how Vellum organizes a second brain.
On Memory Palaces and Spatial Indexing
Architectural loci allow the practitioner to store thousands of cross-referenced propositions without linear decay.
Append a Margin Citation
Test how Vellum validates and links a new folio entry directly into your bibliography.
Archival specifications built for decades.
Flick through our core preservation standards. Every vault is stored locally in open formats you own outright.
Cite-Key Permanent IDs
Every paragraph receives an immutable folio identifier that survives file renames and manuscript restructures.
Side-by-Side Primary Sources
Pin high-resolution archival scans beside your draft and link specific manuscript regions to your footnotes.
Contradiction Detection
Surface historical counter-evidence from your own past reading notes whenever you draft a new thesis claim.
Print-Ready Typesetting
Compile chapters with automatic apparatus criticus, endnotes, and Chicago or Oxford bibliography formatting.
Century-Grade Plain Text
Your archive lives on your disk in human-readable files with zero proprietary database lock-in.
Trusted by historians, biographers, and fellows.
Scholars across forty universities rely on Vellum to compile books and critical editions.
“Vellum replaced six separate folders of PDFs, index cards, and half-finished chapters. My dissertation footnotes now assemble themselves as I read.”
“Most note apps treat thoughts like disposable chat messages. Vellum treats every source excerpt like a permanent archival plate.”
Begin your permanent research archive.
Create your local Vellum vault with full BibTeX synchronization and unlimited manuscript folios.
Includes macOS, Windows, and Linux local vault installers with plain-text Markdown storage.