Collections are an easy way to organize related documents across all your tools by a single topic. You can think of them as a way to curate a set of documents for other teammates to find and use easily.

Have a big launch coming up?

Group that planning doc, Jira epic, design folder, and marketing communications in a single collection, so your cross-functional team stays aligned.

Have someone new joining your team?

Organize all the onboarding information that a new employee needs to get up and running into a collection, and share the link with them on their first day.

Have documents related to a horizontal or vertical scattered everywhere?

Group those docs into a collection so your teammates can find what they need quickly.

The use cases are endless! Let's take a look at how collections work.

Open the Collections dashboard, and click "New Collection" in the upper right-hand corner. Then create the collection's title (choose something that will describe its contents), select an emoji to be used as the collection's icon and then enter a description. Don't worry if you don't have the perfect idea for these yet! You can change them any time.

You can add links to a collection by clicking on one of the five options in the "+ Add " drop-down menu seen above. Clicking "Document" will pull up a search box that allows you to look for any files you want that Glean indexes. Click on the "Add to Collection" button next to a search result to add it to the collection. From this view, you can add multiple items to a collection at once: keep searching and adding until you've found everything you want to include. (There is no technical limit on the number of items in a collection, but we recommend keeping them to no more than 30 items for readability purposes.)

You can also add content you can't find searching Glean by using the "🌐URL" option in that same drop-down menu. This helps organize content like external media mentions or sites that don't make sense to include in Glean's index, like an expense reporting system or benefits portal.

When added via search, Glean will automatically populate the item’s title, offer an integrated preview on the collection page, and show that the item is tagged in a collection on search results so users can easily find related information. Items added to a collection via URL will only show a link and will not include the integrated preview or search result tags.

Search to pull up the document(s) you want to add to your collection. Hover over the document, click on the three dot menu, and use the "Add to Collection" quick action from the results.

You can add Answers and documents from connected workplace apps to Collections.

In the modal that appears, you can quickly filter to add the document to a Collection that already exists or create a new one.

Once an item is in a collection, you can give it a brief, one-paragraph description, so other people viewing the collection can understand its purpose and why it has been included.

For example, if you've created an onboarding collection for your team, use these description fields to help guide people through the onboarding process, provide instructions about setting up their GitHub profile, or fill out a form to request office supplies.

When a document is part of a Collection, you'll see the Collection on the search result.

You can also filter by Collection using the filters under the search box or use the search operator app:collections

You can view all of your company's collections from the Collections dashboard, which can be found here. From this dashboard, you can create new collections, search for collections other people have created using the "Filter" box directly above the gallery table, and delete collections.

Deleting a Collection won't delete or affect any of the underlying documents within it - it will just remove the Collection from Glean.

You can organize Collections into sections using Headers or create Subcollections to nest collections within.

You can update permissions for which teammates or departments should have edit access to the contents of any collection using the Share button.

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