--- title: Public Discovery description: How visitors find, browse, cite, share, and understand material published from Preservated. section: guides order: 8 updated: 2026-07-16 verified: 2026-07-16 related: [guides/collections-and-permissions, guides/downloads-and-sharing, guides/working-with-artifacts, guides/map-browsing, guides/community-submissions] features: [collections, artifact-metadata, wiki, galleries-and-favorites, map-browse, community-contributions, georeferenced-maps] --- # Public Discovery You'll understand the public surfaces Preservated can build from your archive and the metadata that makes them useful. Preservated is not only a storage system. It turns collection records, files, and interpretive content into visitor-facing pages that can be browsed, searched, cited, shared, and reused according to your institution's policies. ## Collection browsing Collections are the primary public browse structure. A visitor might start with a named collection, then filter by subject, date, place, format, or creator. Good collection design is usually practical, not perfect. Use collections for groups visitors understand: exhibits, donor collections, neighborhoods, schools, industries, departments, or grant projects. Because artifacts can belong to multiple collections, you do not need to choose a single home for material that legitimately belongs in more than one context. A **Sort** control lets visitors reorder any browse or collection view. Its **Featured** option surfaces the items your institution has marked most significant or that score highest for visual interest, so curatorial choices shape what visitors encounter first. The default order is most-recently-updated. ## Map browsing Visitors can also explore geographically: the institution's **map** plots every artifact whose place carries coordinates, with the same search and visibility rules as Browse. A filtered Browse view carries straight onto the map with **View on map**. See [Browse artifacts on a map](/docs/en-US/guides/map-browsing). ## Artifact pages An artifact page is the public home for one record. It combines: - The best available viewer for the asset type. - The curated title, date, description, identifiers, rights, and credit. - People, creators, places, subjects, and related collections. - Download, share, and citation actions when allowed. - Text layers such as OCR or transcripts when present. The page should answer two visitor questions quickly: "What am I looking at?" and "What may I do with it?" ### Viewing a georeferenced map A scanned historic map that Preservated has successfully georeferenced gets an **Image | Map** switch on its artifact page, next to the viewer. **Image** is the default and behaves like any other image — full pan-and-zoom inspection of the scan itself. **Map** replaces the viewer with the historic map warped onto a modern basemap in its correct geographic position, opening already zoomed to the map's coverage, so a visitor can see how the mapped area relates to today's streets and coastline. Map view includes: - An **opacity slider** to fade between the historic map and the modern basemap underneath. - A choice of **street or satellite basemap**. - **Fit map** to re-center and re-zoom to the map's full coverage. - Required attribution for the basemap and map source. - **Map details**, an expandable panel with the coordinate system, the transformation used to warp the image, an accuracy summary, and a link to download the underlying georeference annotation. Switching to Map view updates the page's address to include `?asset=&view=map`, so the map view itself is shareable and bookmarkable — following the link returns the same asset in the same view. If the link becomes invalid (the georeference was removed, or the viewer isn't authorized to see the asset), the page falls back to Image view rather than showing an error. Visitors whose browser can't render the interactive map (no WebGL, for example) see a text description of the map's title and coverage with a clear way back to Image view. Map view isn't available while a tour is open on the artifact — starting a tour switches back to Image automatically. :::note Not every TIFF becomes a georeferenced map. See [Georeferenced maps](/docs/en-US/reference/supported-file-formats#georeferenced-maps) for how Preservated detects and validates the geographic metadata that unlocks Map view. ::: ### Crediting an imported source When a record was imported from another repository (for example, public-domain material from the Library of Congress), Preservated keeps a link back to the original source. By default that link is shown only to staff. To credit the source publicly, turn on **Show imported source links publicly** under **Admin → Settings → Access & Discovery** — the link to the original then appears on the public artifact page. Keeping a visible link back to the source is a respectful, responsible way to hold a local copy for search and community memory while pointing visitors to where it came from. ## Search and deep links Preservated search can use more than artifact titles. Descriptions, dates, subjects, places, people, extracted document text, OCR, and transcripts all make records discoverable. For long media, the best result is often a deep link. A transcript match can take a visitor to a timestamp in an oral history. OCR can point to a page in a scanned document. This is why text layers matter: they turn hidden content inside files into searchable evidence. ### Community-note snippets Accepted, publicly-published community contributions — notes, pinned image annotations, and oral-history transcripts — are searchable too. A matching result shows a "Community note" snippet instead of (or alongside) the usual title/description match, so a visitor's memory or identification can surface an item that thin catalog metadata alone would have missed. Museum-only contributions never appear in public search results, and anything withdrawn or redacted is removed from the index entirely. See [Community Submissions](/docs/en-US/guides/community-submissions) for how staff review and publish these. ## Citations and sharing Visitors often need a durable way to cite material. Artifact pages should expose stable URLs and citation-ready fields such as title, creator, institution, identifier, date, and access date. Rights and attribution fields are equally important. A useful public archive does not only let visitors copy an image; it tells them how to credit it and what restrictions apply. ## Interpretive content Some visitor experiences need more than catalog metadata. Preservated's content system and wiki-style articles can provide essays, historical context, biographies, exhibit text, and topic pages that link back to artifacts. Use catalog records for evidence and interpretive pages for narrative. That keeps the object record clean while still giving visitors the context they need. ## Personal discovery tools Galleries and favorites support researcher workflows. A signed-in visitor can save artifacts for later, group them for a project, or build a personal set without changing institutional collections or access rules. Signed-out visitors see a disabled "Log in to save" button instead. These personal tools never publish or restrict institutional material by themselves. They sit on top of the same visibility rules as everything else. ### Saving to a gallery The folder-plus button on an artifact page opens a small panel anchored to the button, listing your galleries with checkboxes. Clicking a gallery instantly adds or removes the artifact — the panel stays open, so you can toggle several galleries in one visit. A **New gallery…** row at the bottom opens a small dialog to name and create a gallery, which saves the artifact into it in the same step. For an artifact with more than one asset — front and back of a document, several pages, multiple views of an object — a gallery entry remembers the specific asset that was on screen when you saved it, not just the artifact. Save the same artifact from two different pages and you get two distinct entries, each opening straight back to the view you saved. The picker shows a checkmark for the view currently displayed; a muted "N other views" note under a gallery's name means the artifact is already saved there through a different view. Older entries saved before this behavior existed simply continue to show whatever the artifact's primary image currently is. Gallery cards, gallery-seeded tours, and gallery-generated videos all open or render the exact asset that was pinned. If an asset's visibility later changes so that a gallery's viewer (or a tour or video's audience) is no longer allowed to see it, that entry shows a placeholder instead of the image, is skipped when a tour is built from the gallery, and is left out of a gallery video — it never becomes visible just because it's sitting in someone's gallery. ### Your account The avatar menu in the top navigation bar gives a signed-in visitor direct links to Favorites, Galleries, Orders, and My submissions, alongside the full Account area. The Account dashboard totals your activity across every institution you belong to — favorites, galleries, institutions, orders, and submissions — and its sidebar lists those institutions under an **Institutions** section so you can jump straight to any of them. If you came from an institution's public site, a back link at the top of the sidebar returns you to the last page you were on there. ## What makes discovery work well The public experience improves when staff invest in a few high-leverage fields: - Clear titles that identify the subject, place, and approximate date. - Consistent subjects and place names. - Rights statements with credit lines. - Collection membership that matches how visitors browse. - Transcripts or OCR for text-rich records. - Public descriptions that explain why the item matters. :::tip You do not need to finish every record before publishing. A small amount of consistent metadata across many artifacts often helps visitors more than perfect metadata on only a few. :::