Collaboration and Project Management
Digital humanities teams often have complex management needs and may benefit from Airtable's collaboration features.
Workspaces
All Airtable bases are stored in a workspace. The owner of the workspace can grant collaborator access to certain bases and permissions.
The number of collaborators that can be added to a workspace and the granularity of permission control is dependent on the workspace's billing plan. User permission levels include Owner, Creator, Editor, Commenter, and Read-Only. Permission levels control the ability of users to add, delete, or modify records, create tables, fields and views, and access additional features like automations, Airtable sync, interfaces, and extensions.
Additionally, Owners/Creators can adjust the permissions of specific fields, protecting important information from being edited or deleted.
User Fields
Airtable has special field types for assigning tasks to members of your workspace. Users can choose to be notified when they are added to a record.
Airtable also supports created by and modified by fields that will automatically record when workspace collaborators engage with a record. These fields can be grouped, sorted and filtered like other fields.
Commenting
Airtable supports commenting, collaborators to tag one another or leave notes on a record. This may be particularly useful for digital humanities teams that are creating metadata within Airtable, offering a space to discuss, refine, and document metadata decisions.
Note: comments cannot currently be downloaded via standard CSV exports. If you would like to export your record comment history, this can only be done via the Airtable API.
Further Reading
Collaboration in Airtable
- Airtable. “Collaborate with Your Team.” Accessed May 6, 2025.
- Airtable Support. “Airtable Permissions Overview.” Accessed May 9, 2025.
- Airtable Support. “Commenting in Airtable.” Accessed May 9, 2025.
- Airtable. “How to Implement Interface Permissions in Your Workflow.” Accessed May 9, 2025.
Airtable Workflows in DH and GLAM
- Dirk, Katherine, and Jessica Maddox. “Archives and Airtable: Using Cloud-Based Tools for Archival Survey and Workflow Management,” May 2018.
- Waligora, Margaret, Lindsey Gervais, Sarah Ketchley, Wendy Perla Kurtz, Thomas Piggott, and Marc Cormier. “Building the Digital Scholar Lab: A Retrospective.” IDEAH 2, no. 2 (January 12, 2022). https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.c51aea2e.
- O’Riordan, Meaghan, Jolene Beiser, Jessica Maddox, and Rachel Searcy. “It’s All on the Table: Case Studies on Improved Workflow Management Using Airtable.” Journal of Archival Organization 20, no. 1–4 (October 2, 2023): 12–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332748.2024.2318177.
This tutorial is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).