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Jun 25, 2026

Heratio Help Center article. Category: Discovery & Browse.

Browse by Place User Guide

Overview

Browse by Place organises the published holdings by the places they are about. It surfaces the geographic access points already attached to your published records - the places under which the most records sit - as "ways into the collection", so you can start from a place rather than from a search box. Places are shown as a frequency-sized cloud and a ranked list; each one shows how many published records are about it and links straight to those records. Open it at /places. It is the geography companion to Explore by Theme (which groups by subject).

What it does

Browse by Place reads the place access points already attached to your published records and ranks them by how many records are about each one:

  • The busiest places become the largest chips in the cloud - the collection's geographic "ways in".
  • Each place shows its published-record count.
  • Opening a place lists the published records about it, with links to each record and a one-click route into the full browse for that place.

Only published records are counted and shown. Places update automatically as records are described with geographic access points and made public - there is nothing to configure or generate. No geography is built in: the place names come entirely from your own catalogue.

How to use it

  1. Go to /places.
  2. Browse the cloud - larger names are about more published records - or use the ranked All places by frequency list below it.
  3. Click a place name to open it.
  4. On a place page you will see:
    • The place's label and, where the catalogue holds one, a short scope note.
    • The total number of published records about the place.
    • A paginated list of those records, each linking to the record in full.
    • A Browse all about this place button that opens the main browse page pre-filtered to this place, where you can apply further filters (creator, subject, media, level, and so on).
  5. Use the page links at the bottom of a place to move through long lists.

Machine-readable place list

A read-only JSON list of the places is available at /places.json for reuse in other tools and integrations. It is CORS-open and cacheable, and returns each place's id, label, published-record count, and links. No record content or unpublished material is exposed.

Good to know

  • Published only. Places are built from published records, so the counts match what the public can actually open.
  • It stays current. Place rankings and record lists are computed on the fly from the live catalogue, so they reflect the collection as it is right now.
  • It complements the other slices. Where Explore by Theme groups records by subject and Discoveries / Research Leads show AI-found links between records, Browse by Place groups records by geography - different ways to find related material.