July 10, 2026specificationentries/laf-collections.md

Collections in Life Archive Format

Collections create curated groups inside an archive. They are useful for topics, projects, family branches, recipe categories, travel journals, exhibitions, reading paths, and any other grouping whose order and presentation matter.

Each collection is a Markdown file under collections/.

Board collection example

---
id: family-recipes
type: collection
kind: board
title: Family Recipes
description: Recipes preserved and shared across generations.
featured: true
pos: 1
cover: covers/family-recipes.jpg
items:
  - entry:grandmothers-apple-pie-recipe
  - entry:festival-sweets
  - person:margaret-bennett
  - place:brighton
  - file:recipe-card.jpg
tags:
  - food
  - family
---

This collection brings together recipes, people, places, and original documents.

Core fields

type must be collection.
id is the stable collection identity. If omitted, it is derived from the Markdown path.
kind: board tells the reference app to create a normal collection detail page.
title and description provide the collection's display name and summary.
featured: true makes the collection eligible for prominent home-page placement. If an archive has featured collections, the home page prioritizes that featured set.
pos is an optional numeric sort position. Collections with lower positions sort first; collections without a position sort after positioned collections by title.
cover points to an asset under files/. Both covers/example.jpg and file:covers/example.jpg are accepted by the current renderer.
tags provides free-form classification.
The Markdown body provides a longer introduction for the collection page.

Typed items

The items list is ordered and uses a type prefix:

items:
  - entry:a-family-story
  - person:margaret-bennett
  - place:brighton
  - file:portrait.jpg

Supported prefixes are entry:, person:, place:, and file:. The reference reader also accepts dedicated arrays:

entries:
  - a-family-story
people:
  - margaret-bennett
places:
  - brighton
files:
  - portrait.jpg

Typed items are best when one curated sequence should contain different entity types. Dedicated arrays are useful for generated archives or tools that manage each relationship separately. When both forms are supplied, the reader combines them; avoid repeating the same reference in both.

Ordering and inverse references

The order of items is meaningful and should be preserved by tools. An entry may also name this collection in its own collections list, but that inverse reference does not add or reorder the collection's items. For predictable rendering, maintain both references when both navigation directions matter.

Link collections

The reference app also supports lightweight external or internal link cards:

---
id: project-source
type: collection
kind: link
title: Project Source Code
description: Visit the source repository.
href: https://github.com/example/archive
featured: true
---

For kind: link, the destination may be stored in href, link, or url. This is a renderer extension for navigation cards; portable tools that do not understand it can still preserve and display the collection metadata.

The optional layout field is indexed for future or renderer-specific presentation choices. The current reference app does not use it to change the board layout.