Collections
Collections are dynamic, query-based groupings of records. Unlike a community — which owns its records and governs their lifecycle — a collection simply selects records that match a search query, and collections can be organized hierarchically into trees to build meaningful, browsable groupings of content. A collection cannot enforce access restrictions; that remains the job of communities.
Collections are built on top of InvenioRDM’s collections feature. For the underlying concepts (collection trees, per-collection search queries, nesting, and the Python API used to create them), see the upstream InvenioRDM collections documentation. This page describes what NRP adds on top of it and how to enable it.
Global collections
InvenioRDM scopes each collection tree to a single community, so a collection only ever searches within that community’s records. NRP adds the concept of global collections: a designated holder community whose collection trees search across every published record in the repository, not just the records tagged with that community.
Internally, when a collection belongs to the holder community the usual
parent.communities.ids filter is skipped, so the collection’s query runs
against the whole repository. This lets you build repository-wide, thematic
browsing (for example “Datasets”, “Publications”, “Software”) that is not tied to
any one community.
Enabling collections
Set the following variables in your deployment configuration (invenio.cfg):
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
COMMUNITIES_COLLECTIONS_ENABLED | False | Master switch. Must be truthy for the Collections menu item to appear. |
INVENIO_COLLECTIONS_COMMUNITY_SLUG | "global" | Slug of the community that holds the cross-repository (“global”) collection trees. Its collections search across all records. Set to None to disable global collections. |
INVENIO_COLLECTIONS_UI_URL_PREFIX | "/collections" | URL prefix under which the collections UI is mounted. |
COMMUNITIES_COLLECTIONS_MENU_ORDER | 2 | Position of the Collections item within the main menu. |
Menu visibility is controlled solely by COMMUNITIES_COLLECTIONS_ENABLED — as
long as it is truthy, the Collections item is shown. For the page to be
useful, though, you still need to create the holder community (matching
INVENIO_COLLECTIONS_COMMUNITY_SLUG) and at least one collection tree on it;
otherwise the tab leads to an empty browse page.
Once enabled, a Collections tab appears in the repository’s main menu, alongside Communities:
Collection images
Each collection can display an image (used as its logo on the browse grid and as the header on the collection page). Images are served as static assets, keyed by the collection’s slug.
For a collection whose slug is my-collection, add the file:
static/images/collections/my-collection.jpgThe filename must exactly match the collection’s slug and use the .jpg
extension — the template resolves the image as
images/collections/<collection-slug>.jpg via url_for('static', …). If no
matching file exists, the collection is shown without an image.
After adding new static assets, rebuild/collect the instance’s static files so the image is served.