Digital Systems: Quire

Creating a Personal Project in Quire

For tackling my next digital exhibition project, I was wanting to experiment with a newer and unfamiliar digital system. I decided to go with Quire, (https://quire.getty.edu/) a publishing tool that LAM professions can use to create professional digital exhibits. As a web developer, starting a project with a new digital system can be daunting. To gain a fair assessment of the system, I have created some criteria that are inspired by my personal experiences diving into brand new systems in the past. After I personally evaluate Quire, I want to assess its use in the field; is the system able to meet the requirements necessary for use in a professional setting?

I can fairly judge a system’s overall difficulty for personal and professional use through major factors such as:

• Clear and concise documentation for system specific services such as an API.
• Examples of the system working well.
• How much friction will be present in creating a working environment of the system on my computer, a virtual environment, or a cloud computing service.
• Does the system use open-source technologies and is also open source?
• How familiar am I with the language used to write and interface with the system?

After some extensive use, Quire checks most of the boxes when compared to the average digital system. The documentation is exhaustive; from beginner tutorials to advance topics. Since Quire requires use of the command-line, the documentation eases in the developer starting with the absolute basics to a project get up and running. For those already comfortable with Linux command-line and Node.js, setup is quick and simple. After installation and startup, Quire requires the user to generate a new project. The proof of concept of a working exhibit exists within the sample project; a stunning, complete exhibit ready to host on your favorite environment within a few commands. With setup being so easy and scripted, creating your own exhibit is where the real challenge begins. Before diving in deeper, I had to go back through the documentation to figure out where to add images and edit text files. I would recommend using a popular code editor (e.g., Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text 3, etc..) to ease navigation of the file structure in order to make edits and drop in image files. There was a bit of a learning curve to know what files to edit, multiple templates and languages (i.e., YAML, JavaScript, Markdown) to understand, and a myriad of scripting and export options. Thankfully, Quire does not attempt to recreate the wheel but instead leverages popular code languages and libraries to create a robust system that can generate beautiful exhibits with minimal coding experience.

Quire’s Proliferation in Museums

With the evaluation criteria in mind, I wanted to think about how Quire could be used professionally in museums and libraries. Quire clearly has some advantages over the competition in a few ways. Quire is open source; a huge deal for smaller organizations where funding is an issue as it can be used for free without attribution. Quire is also built using Node.js, a popular runtime environment for the web. Node.js can be found on the front page of the largest developer Q&A site, Stack Overflow; bolstering a high adoption rate and large resource pool. If a developer has issues that go beyond Quire, it should not be an issue to find a solution on the web. Quire can also be deployed on the web using free solutions such as GitHub Pages or Netlify. This is helpful for getting projects on the web quickly–enabling other collaborators from anywhere in the world to provide useful feedback or for projects on tighter schedules. Quire, being built on Node.js, can be hosted on a variety of machines or cloud services. This allows for leveraging computing resources that may already exist for a LAM organization.

Quire may present some challenges to organizations, depending on what resources are accessible. Quire boasts being an “out-of-the-box” solution, but they also warn that going beyond the “box” will require knowledge from a seasoned web developer. Any organization that is wanting to adopt Quire will also need to consider hiring a developer to build and maintain the project. Quire does not come with any themes besides the starting project. Style and structure changes to a project will require knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript in addition to Markdown and YAML. Organizations will have to weigh the cost of hiring a developer against using a proprietary solution that has its own set of costs and challenges. Quire should be viewed as a set of tools that developers can use in collaboration with LAM professionals to build exhibits with existing museum-quality assets.

After extensive use and evaluation of Quire, I can comfortably recommend the system for use in personal and professional projects. After a decent understanding of the system’s workflow through documentation, the goal of getting a Quire project up on the web can be reached within a few hours in the hands of a seasoned Node.js developer. A Quire project’s structure can be complex and will require a learning curve, but with complexity comes an incredible amount of customization. An organization can utilize Quire to make an exhibit that aligns with existing their style guides with almost no compromise. Quire is a powerful digital system that can be used to make exhibits that can accurately compliment the work of LAM professionals.

Until next time,

Andrew Joye