01
Catalog
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 active development
Catalog it properly. Publish it beautifully.
Quirow is a publishing platform for academic, theological, and small-to-mid-sized archives. Full archival description underneath, modern editorial design on the surface, and no server to run.
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. A library 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: serious archival metadata under the hood, editorial design on the surface, and nothing to administer.
What it does
Three surfaces, one system.
Describe the material once. Everything else reads from that description.
02
Publish
A drag-and-drop builder over your own catalog. Compose a landing page, an about page, and narrative exhibits from records you have already described, then publish the whole site at your institution’s own address.
03
Discover
A faceted research view so scholars can actually browse the collection at every level — the thing catalogs exist for, and the thing exhibit tools routinely forget.
Who it’s for
Built for theological libraries first.
Not because the problem is unique to them, but because it is worth solving properly for one audience before pretending to solve it for everyone.
Seminary librariesAccredited theological schools with real digitization needs, genuinely valuable holdings, and limited IT capacity. The first audience, and the one the product is shaped around.
Scripture referencesStructured book, chapter, and verse tagging as a first-class access point — the kind of retrieval subject headings cannot express and a theological collection cannot do without.
Adjacent collectionsSmall academic special collections, denominational archives, and religious historical societies share the same shape of problem and the same staffing reality.
Deliberately notLarge institutions with an archives IT department. They are already served, and building for them would compromise every decision that makes this work for everyone else.
Who’s building it
One librarian, on purpose.
I’m William, a librarian at the J.W. Dickhaut Library at Methodist Theological School in Ohio. Quirow is not a startup I left my job for — it is a tool I needed, built at the speed institutional software should actually be built.
Our own Schooler Institute on Preaching archive is the first collection in it, which means every rough edge is one I hit myself before anyone else could.
Quirow isn’t for sale yet.
It is in active development with a single pilot institution, and there are no plans or pricing to announce. If you run a seminary library or a small special collection — or you just want to follow where this goes — I’d genuinely like to hear from you.
hello@quirow.com