  Measurements at particle collider experiments, even if primarily aimed at
understanding Standard Model processes, can have a high degree of model
independence, and implicitly contain information about potential contributions
from physics beyond the Standard Model. The Contur package allows users to
benefit from the hundreds of measurements preserved in the Rivet library to
test new models against the bank of LHC measurements to date. This method has
proven to be very effective in several recent publications from the Contur
team, but ultimately, for this approach to be successful, the authors believe
that the Contur tool needs to be accessible to the wider high energy physics
community. As such, this manual accompanies the first user-facing version:
Contur v2. It describes the design choices that have been made, as well as
detailing pitfalls and common issues to avoid. The authors hope that with the
help of this documentation, external groups will be able to run their own
Contur studies, for example when proposing a new model, or pitching a new
search.
