01
Describe
Full DACS Part I and Part II support, multilevel hierarchy with inheritance computed at read time, live Library of Congress authority lookups, and controlled vocabularies as real tables — not free-text fields you hope stay consistent.
In development
Describe it properly. Publish it beautifully.
One system for describing a collection, publishing it, and building exhibitions from it. Full archival description underneath, modern editorial design on the surface, and nothing to administer.
- Full DACS Part I and Part II support
- Library of Congress authorities, live
- Nothing to install or administer
Speaks the standards archives already use
- DACS
- LCSH
- LCNAF
- LCGFT
- AAT
- ISO 639-2
- RightsStatements.org
- Creative Commons
The gap
Small archives get two bad options.
Archival software you can’t staff
Purpose-built systems are genuinely capable and operationally punishing. They assume a server administrator, a migration plan, and weeks of setup. An institution with two staff and no dedicated IT has none of the three, so the collection stays in a spreadsheet and a folder of scans.
Website builders that don’t know what an archive is
The other direction will give you something handsome in an afternoon, and nowhere to put a scope and content note, a conditions governing access statement, or an authority record. What you publish looks finished and describes nothing.
Quirow is the middle that should already exist — description rigorous enough for a professional, output good enough to put your name on.
What it does
Four jobs, one description.
Describe the material once. Everything else reads from that description.
02
Publish
A drag-and-drop builder over your own descriptions. Compose a landing page and an about page, set your logo and navigation, and put the whole site live at your institution’s own address.
03
Exhibit
Build narrative exhibitions from the records you have already described. Editorial framing lives on the page, so telling a story about a collection never edits the collection.
04
Discover
A faceted research view so scholars can browse the collection at every level — the job a finding aid exists to do, and the one exhibit tools routinely forget.
In practice
The details that decide whether you keep using it.
Hierarchy you can navigate
A collection’s full structure sits in one tree, each level marked by its own colour, every child reachable from its parent. Digital objects appear at whatever level they are attached to rather than hiding three clicks down.
Record status is visible everywhere, so you always know what is draft and what is live.
The standard, open beside the form
DACS is long, and nobody has memorised it. Its full text sits in a panel next to the record you are describing, so checking what an element actually requires never means leaving the form.
Required elements are marked as you go, and publishing is gated on them — a record cannot go public missing something the standard requires.
A reading room, not only an exhibit
A curated page tells one story. The research view lets a visitor go past it — facets for type, subject, creator and genre, the collection tree alongside, and the full archival description on every record.
It is the surface scholars actually need, and the one exhibit tools routinely leave out.
Under it
Built on the standards archives actually use.
The parts that are painful to retrofit are the parts that were settled first.
DACS, in fullFull Part I and Part II support, with a publish gate that will not let a record go public missing an element DACS requires.
Multilevel hierarchyCollection to series to file to item. Each level stores only what is set at that level, and inherited values are computed when a record is read — so correcting a collection-level statement corrects everything beneath it, at once.
Real authority controlName, subject, and genre access points come from live Library of Congress lookups, and vocabularies are tables rather than free-text fields. Authority records are first-class, with their own variant names and relationships.
Scripture referencesStructured book, chapter, and verse tagging as a first-class access point — the kind of retrieval subject headings cannot express, and which general-purpose tools have no reason to add.
Files that scaleUploads go straight from the browser to object storage, so what you can deposit is not bounded by what a web form tolerates. Every institution’s files sit in a bucket of their own, reached through short-lived signed links.
Isolation by defaultSeparation between institutions is enforced in the database, not by application code remembering to filter, and nothing is public until it is deliberately published.
See it working
A real archive you can open right now.
The demo archive holds five collections of real objects from museum open-access programs, described to DACS and published with three exhibitions. Look at it from either side.
The public site
Browse it as a visitor
The archive’s own website: exhibitions, the collections, and the full archival description behind every object. No account needed.
The admin
Work in it as the archivist
One click opens a private copy of the archive that only you can see. Describe a record, build an exhibit, publish it, and preview it as the public would. It disappears after 24 hours.
Get in touch.
Quirow is in development and not yet generally available. If you look after a collection this would suit, or you simply want to follow where it goes, the inbox is open.