I find it occasionally useful to have the option to manage collections of selected edges, so I basically copied the functionality of the Facemap select add-on and changed it to work on edges instead of faces.
The add-on can be downloaded from Github. Simply click on the "download raw file" button (near the top right) and then install the file as an add-on in the usual manner. The panel with the edge map functionality can then be found in the Mesh properties (the operators themselves are only active in edit mode).