Open tools for endangered cultural heritage.
MIRL Tools are free, open instruments for studying, documenting, and defending cultural heritage, made for the people who do this work one scholar, one community, or one collection at a time. They are built for the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage: curators, archivists, historians, conservators, artists, community researchers, and students. You do not need to know how to code to use any of them.
The large organizations in this field run on infrastructure most researchers, archivists, and communities cannot access: funded studios, hosted databases, institutional platforms. These tools are for the work that happens outside those systems, where keeping control of data and protecting the people in it cannot be delegated to someone else’s server.
Every tool in the set holds to the same commitments:
- Runs in the browser, installs nothing. Open a web page and begin. No build step, no framework, no sign-up. The browser tools run on your own machine and work offline.
- Local-first and private. Nothing leaves your computer unless you choose to share it. Your project lives in a single file you keep, edit in the browser, and save where you like.
- Built to protect the people in the record. Restricted material, source identities, and unsafe locations can be kept out of anything you share, and released only when you choose to. The tools are made to keep that protection close to the work.
- Evidentiary discipline where it counts. In the tools built for evidence, source files are fingerprinted (sha-256) with their date and provenance, so what you publish stays tethered to what it came from.
- Open and citable. Each tool is free, openly licensed, and documented for non-coders, with a citation ready for your bibliography.
How the tools fit together
Each tool does one job, runs on its own, and keeps its own file. You can pick up a single one and never touch the rest. But they are built as one family, and together they follow the arc of the work:
The arc of the work
- 01Securerescue-archiving
- 02Catalogue what is goneMIRL Lacuna
- 03Assess what standsMIRL Aftermath
- 04Read the objectMIRL 3D Analyzer
Because they hold to the same commitments and export plain, documented files, work moves cleanly from one tool to the next, or out to larger systems, with no lock-in. Use one on its own, or several together.
rescue-archiving
Make a safe, verifiable copy of online media before it disappears.
The front door of the set. Give it one link or one file at a time, and it makes a tamper-evident copy on your own computer, asks the Internet Archive to keep an independent dated copy, and records exactly what it did so the result can be trusted later. It never alters your originals, and it is built to protect the people who provide material. For anyone watching evidence, testimony, or a record vanish from the web and needing to hold onto it properly.
Source · (command-line tool)
MIRL Lacuna
A catalogue for what is gone.
A cataloguer for archives that no longer exist. Most collection software assumes the object is on a shelf; Lacuna assumes it is not. Each entry records a work that has been destroyed, damaged, looted, dispersed, or lost track of, together with the evidence for saying so, the people and places involved, and whatever copies or fragments survive. What is gone is recorded as carefully as what survives. For a lost collection, conflict losses held at the contributors’ consent, or colonial dispersal scattered across institutions.
MIRL Aftermath
A condition dossier for damaged heritage.
Where Lacuna records what is gone, Aftermath documents damage to what still stands. It turns a folder of loose before-and-after photographs into a standardized condition dossier, the kind of document a court, a tribunal, or a UNESCO or ALIPH submission can rest on. One dossier covers one site: what it is, the events that harmed it, and a series of dated assessments, each a condition report on one part of the site with a before-and-after pair, optionally aligned so the damage reads plainly. For post-strike surveys, conservators, field surveyors, and human-rights researchers.
MIRL 3D Analyzer
Open a 3D scan of an object in the browser, turn it in the light, and read its surface.
A workbench for three-dimensional scans of objects: ceramics, lithics, bone, metalwork, casts, and anything else a scanner can capture. Drag a model onto the page (OBJ, STL, or PLY) and rotate, relight, and slice through it to read a wall thickness, or colour it by curvature so a worn edge, a tool mark, or a hairline crack stands out where a plain grey model hides it. Measure straight across or along the surface itself at real-world scale, gauge how polished or pitted a passage is with standard ISO roughness figures, drop labelled pins on the features that matter, and set two objects side by side with their cameras locked to compare an object with its cast, or one state with another. Annotations and the catalogue of what you have examined export to a spreadsheet as you go. For curators, archaeologists, and conservators studying objects that museums and labs increasingly scan but rarely have laptop-scale tools to read.
Further tools are in development, and will be added here as they are ready.