Built by someone who has to use it.
Quirow started because the tool I needed at work did not exist in a form my library could actually run.
I’m William, a librarian at the J.W. Dickhaut Library at Methodist Theological School in Ohio. I am not a software company. I am a working librarian with a collection that deserved better treatment than a spreadsheet and a folder of scans, and no realistic path to the systems that would have treated it properly.
The established archival platforms are genuinely good software. They also assume an institution with a server administrator, a migration budget, and time. Ours has none of those, and neither does almost any small theological library I know. The alternative — a website builder — produces something that looks finished and cannot hold a scope and content note. Between capable-but-unstaffable and attractive-but-empty, there was nothing.
The shape of the thing
So I started building the middle. Serious archival description underneath — full DACS Part I and Part II, real multilevel hierarchy, controlled vocabularies, authority records — with a publishing layer on top that produces something a library is actually proud to link to. And structured scripture references, because a theological collection needs an access point that subject headings cannot express, and no general-purpose tool was ever going to add it.
Our own Schooler Institute on Preaching archive is the first collection in the system. That is deliberate: every rough edge is one I hit myself, in my actual job, before anyone else could.
How it’s being built
I own the archival and design decisions; I write the code with AI assistance, in sessions, against a project record that keeps the reasoning attached to the decisions. That arrangement is why a single librarian can carry a real schema, a real access-control model, and a real publishing pipeline at the same time — and it is a fair description of what building software looks like for a lot of us now.
It also imposes a discipline I have come to like: nothing gets built that I cannot explain, and every decision that would be expensive to reverse gets argued out before it is written.
The pace is the point
I am keeping my job. This is not a venture-backed sprint toward an exit, and it is not for sale yet — there are no plans, no pricing, and no signup. It is a long project that grows at the speed institutional buyers actually move, meant to support the academic-library life I like rather than replace it.
That pace is not a limitation I am apologizing for. Archives think in decades. Software that serves them should be built by someone willing to still be here in ten years.
Get in touch
If you run a seminary library or a small special collection and this sounds like your problem, I would like to hear about your collection — what you hold, what you have tried, and what stopped you. That is the most useful thing anyone can send me right now.
If you are here from a link and just want to see what I am working on, that is welcome too.