Terms of service
These terms cover use of Quirow, including this site and the application at app.quirow.com. Quirow is operated by an individual, not a company, and is in active development.
Status of the service
Quirow is not generally available. It is pre-release software in use at a small number of pilot institutions. There is no public signup, no published pricing, and no plan you can purchase. Accounts are created by arrangement.
Features may change or be removed during development. Where a change would affect an institution’s existing content, it will be discussed with them beforehand.
Accounts
Accounts belong to institutions and are created for named staff. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account. Do not share logins; ask for an additional account instead. Tell me promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.
Your content stays yours
Archival material, descriptions, uploaded files, and published pages belong to the institution that created them. Using Quirow grants no ownership over any of it. The permission needed is narrow and practical: to store, process, and display that content in order to operate the service — including serving it publicly on pages the institution has chosen to publish.
Institutional content is not used to train machine-learning models, and it is not sold or licensed to anyone.
By default, descriptive metadata created in Quirow is released under CC0, following prevailing practice for archival description. Rights in the described materials themselves are stated per record by the institution and are unaffected.
What you are responsible for
You are responsible for having the right to upload and publish what you publish, including copyright clearance and any privacy, donor-agreement, or cultural-sensitivity obligations attached to the material. Archival collections routinely contain material about living people and material acquired under conditions; Quirow provides draft and published states and per-record rights statements, but it cannot make those judgments for you.
Do not use the service to:
- publish material you do not have the right to publish;
- store content unrelated to the institution’s collections;
- attempt to access another institution’s data, or probe, scan, or disrupt the service.
Availability and backups
Quirow is offered on a best-effort basis. There is no uptime guarantee during development, and planned or unplanned interruptions can happen. Keep your own copies of anything irreplaceable. Quirow is a publishing and description system; it is not, and should not be treated as, your preservation copy of record.
Ending it
An institution can stop using Quirow at any time and request an export of its data. I may suspend an account for the conduct listed above, or wind down the service — in which case institutions get reasonable notice and an opportunity to export everything before anything is deleted.
No warranty
The service is provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, liability for any claim arising out of use of the service is limited to the amount paid for it in the preceding twelve months — which, during development, is nothing.
This is a plain statement of reality rather than a negotiating position: a pre-release product run by one person cannot responsibly promise otherwise, which is exactly why you should keep your own copies.
Changes to these terms
These terms will change as the product matures, particularly when it becomes generally available. The date at the top is the last revision, and institutions with accounts will be told directly about material changes.
Contact
Questions, or anything here that does not work for your institution: hello@quirow.com. It is a short document on purpose, and it is negotiable.