Heratio Help Center article. Category: Discovery & Browse.

Explore the Collection User Guide

Overview

Explore the Collection is a single public hub that gathers the collection's browse-by surfaces in one place, so you can start exploring from a theme, a place, a person, or a period rather than from a search box. It shows a small teaser from each surface and links straight through to the full page. Open it at /explore-collection.

It complements the existing /explore hub: where /explore lists the collection's public capabilities (ask the collection, read in your language, content credentials, open data, and so on), Explore the Collection focuses on the browse-by discovery surfaces specifically.

What it does

Explore the Collection brings together the discovery surfaces this collection ships and previews each one:

Explore by theme - a handful of the collection's strongest subjects, each linking to that theme and to the full themes page.
Browse by place - the busiest places the records are about, linking to each place and to the full places page.
People and organisations - the people and organisations credited with creating the most records, linking to each creator and to the full people page.
Browse by period - a compact timeline strip showing how the records spread across time, linking each period into the browse and to the full timeline.

Each panel is a small sample drawn live from the published collection. A panel appears only when its surface is installed, so you never see a dead link. If none of the surfaces has anything to show yet, the hub shows a calm "exploration tools are warming up" message instead of an error.

Only published records are counted and shown.

How to use it

Go to /explore-collection.
Skim the panels. Each one is a different door into the same holdings.
Click any item to open it - a theme, a place, a creator, or a period.
Click a panel's Browse all link (for example, Browse all themes) to open the full surface, where you can page through everything and apply further filters.
The timeline strip's bars link into the main browse, pre-filtered to that period.

Machine-readable hub data

A read-only JSON twin of the hub is available at /explore-collection.json for reuse in other tools and integrations. It is CORS-open and cacheable, and returns the same per-surface teaser data (only for the surfaces that are installed). No record content or unpublished material is exposed.

Good to know

Published only. Every teaser is built from published records, so the counts match what the public can actually open.
It stays current. The teasers are computed on the fly from the live catalogue, so they reflect the collection as it is right now.
No dead links. Each panel and onward link only renders when its surface is installed.
It is a hub, not a new surface. The full experiences live on their own pages (/themes, /places, /people, /timeline); this page simply gathers a taste of each.