MCN 2024

Getty developed Quire, an open-source, multiformat publishing tool, to solve our institution’s digital publishing challenges and to help smaller, less resourced museums solve theirs. From the beginning, the Quire team has collaborated closely with our Getty Publications colleagues to achieve publishing goals and gain insight into how non-technical staff use and understand the tool. This is helpful, as a large percentage of Quire’s community is made up of editors, curators, academics, designers, and others who don’t possess deep knowledge of coding or web development.

As a tool, Quire was designed to be flexible, extensible, and sustainable, which necessitates a more exposed work environment. Rather than an intuitive GUI, Quire users are confronted with navigating the command line, working in Markdown and YAML, and sometimes even using (gasp!) GitHub. While this might feel like second nature for developers, it represents a very different and often intimidating way of working for content creators.

In this 15-minute case study, we’ll talk about the lessons we’ve learned using a technologically nuanced tool like Quire with a Getty Publications book editor. Using a 600-object collection catalogue as an example, we’ll discuss the drawbacks and benefits of switching to a digital toolbox and how that change impacts departmental workflows. We’ll also share how the Quire team seeks to make the challenges of working digitally more approachable to non-technical users and discover what it means to find a common language in the process.