Quire is an open-source publishing platform developed by Getty for creating publications in various formats, including web, print, and e-books. Originally designed to support the publication of collection catalogs and research monographs by Getty Publications, Quire has gradually evolved into a generic publishing framework capable of producing websites, print books, and e-books from a single source. Its goal is to provide a sustainable publishing method, based on structured content, metadata, and media, within an open and reproducible production workflow.

Rather than relying on traditional desktop publishing software as the primary authoring environment, Quire adopts a static publishing model in which content is described as text files. Texts are written in Markdown, publication metadata is structured in YAML, while images, bibliographic references, work records, and other scholarly resources are managed as separate datasets. This separation of content, metadata, and layout promotes the reuse of information, facilitates its maintenance, and ensures greater consistency of publications over time.

The editorial workflow is based on the Hugo static site generator, which transforms source files into a complete publication. From a single editorial source, Quire produces multiple distribution formats, including a responsive website, a print-ready PDF, and EPUB versions. Web and print are thus no longer considered two separate productions, but rather different manifestations of the same publication.

Quire was designed to meet the requirements of museum catalogs. Beyond text and images, it offers structures dedicated to artwork descriptions, object metadata, citations, bibliographies, figures, footnotes, and other editorial elements characteristic of museum catalogs and research publications. These various components are described as structured data, which allows them to be reused consistently throughout the publication while facilitating navigation, cross-referencing, and the long-term preservation of content.

Although initially developed for Getty Publications, Quire was designed as an open-source infrastructure that can be adopted and adapted by other museums, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions. Rather than providing a single publishing template, it offers a configurable editorial environment that can be customized using themes, templates, and style sheets, while maintaining a common editorial structure. This flexibility allows each institution to develop its own publications while building on a shared technical foundation.

The development of Quire is part of a broader shift in publishing practices toward editorial workflows based on open text formats, version control systems, and static generation tools. By using simple text formats, structured data, and open-source software, Quire promotes collaborative workflows that bring together authors, editors, designers, and developers around a single editorial source, rather than a series of conversions between formats.

Quire has inspired numerous web-to-print publishing projects, such as the book Les sculptures de la villa romaine de Chiragan (Julie Blanc and Antoine Fauchié) and the Velours publishing series (Agathe Baëz, Nicolas Taffin, Julien Taquet), which has been used for certain Louvre catalogs (such as Antoon Van Dyck, Catalogue raisonnée des tableaux du musée du Louvre).