Public access and Explore

What the digitisation was for.

Once the backlog is catalogued, staff get a research surface and the public get a way in.

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Included on paid plans · No separate portal build

Staff first

The research surface behind the desk.

Enquiries, exhibition research and appraisal all run on the same reviewed records.

The Explore research chat in Archivers.ai answering a question about a football club’s community role before 1900, drawing on an 1899 board-minutes accession and naming the gaps and silences in the record
Explore

Ask the collection a question.

On paid plans, Explore reads transcripts, metadata and descriptions across the processed collection, then cites the items behind its answer.

  • Answers enquiries without five separate searches
  • Citations click through to the item
  • One credit per Explore message
Staff-side search in Archivers.ai for a British family who emigrated to Canada after the war, returning nineteen results as thumbnail cards with dates, titles, extents and subject tags
Search

Everything reviewed, in one index.

Search runs across records, descriptions and transcripts — the same reviewed material the public portal publishes.

  • Phrase and exclusion operators
  • Filter by type, date and fonds
  • Hits inside transcribed audio and video
See the platform
The public portal

A front door on your own subdomain.

Themed to your service, published on your schedule, running on records a person has accepted — and built to the OAI-PMH and IIIF standards that aggregators and image viewers already consume.

Browse and search

A hub landing page, browse by fonds and accession, and full public search.

Governed publishing

Schedule a release, and a preflight check holds back unreviewed items.

English and Welsh

A bilingual toggle for English and Welsh interface text, with record content unaffected.

Two honest notes. The citizen-facing portal is built to a WCAG 2.2 AA working target; that is not yet a conformance claim. The Welsh interface text is machine-drafted and still needs a native-speaker review before a Welsh Language Standards audience.

Evidence

Receipts for the funder.

The repository stays the system of record. This is the layer that shows the investment still working.

30-day rollup of portal views by page type

Searches and sessions as engagement evidence

Downloads and referring contexts

Scoped tokens time-limited and revocable

Plan the access layer in early.

It is easier to agree the public layer at scoping than to bolt it on after the grant closes.

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