Short, quick notes — a few words written down in a hurry so you will not forget something, rather than anything finished or organised. The word almost always appears in the plural: you speak of your jottings, not of a jotting. It carries a feeling of modesty, so writers use it about their own work to make it sound small and unpolished — 'these are just a few jottings' — even when the notes turn out to be valuable. That modest tone means it turns up quite often in the titles of books and columns made of short pieces. It is more British than American and a little literary or old-fashioned; in ordinary speech, on either side of the Atlantic, most people would just say 'notes'.