Sending someone six document links and asking them to keep track is a bad way to hand over a course, a client deliverable, or an onboarding pack. One of the six gets lost. Someone asks a question of the wrong one. The whole thing arrives as a wall of URLs in an email nobody wants to scroll.
A collection is that same set of documents behind a single link. Readers land on one page, browse what is there, open whichever they need, and, if you allow it, ask a question that gets answered from several documents or the whole set at once.
Collections carry your branding, can sit behind a passcode or a token link, and are available on paid plans.
The two decisions that matter
Most of the collection editor is what you would expect: name it, describe it, pick a cover, choose documents, drag them into the order readers will see. Two settings are worth thinking about properly, because they change how the thing behaves rather than how it looks.
The first is whether readers can chat across everything. Turn on Allow chat across all documents and a reader's question is answered from the whole set. That is right for a body of material where the answer could be anywhere: a policy library, a course, a product's documentation. It is wrong when the documents disagree with each other on purpose, like this year's guidance and last year's, in which case you want people asking one document at a time and knowing which one they asked.
Readers get to choose either way. A Chat Mode menu offers Pick a document, Select documents, or Chat across all, and a ? beside it opens a short explainer answering the question they are probably having, which is "Should I chat with all documents?". If collection-wide chat is off, the menu quietly becomes a Browse documents button instead of advertising something they cannot do.
The second is prompt precedence. A collection can carry its own custom prompt, and so can each document inside it. A checkbox settles who wins: Let a document's own prompt win in single-document chat. Ticked, each document keeps its own voice when opened alone, while chats across several use the collection's. Unticked, the collection's prompt applies everywhere. Neither is the right answer in general. A course wants one consistent voice; a library of independently maintained documents does not.
Chatting with a live selection
Once a chat is open, a sidebar lists every document, grouped by category. Ticking or unticking a document changes the live conversation immediately, with no apply step, and the last remaining one cannot be unticked. An All documents row selects or clears everything and reports where you are, "Chatting with 4 docs".
Collapse the sidebar and it becomes a rail of numbered squares in the same order, each showing its title on hover and a Chatting badge when it is part of the current conversation. It is a small piece of interface, but it means a reader can narrow from twelve documents to the two that matter without losing their place or restarting the chat.
Paused documents are left out of all of this. Which brings us to a detail that catches people.
Pausing, and what it does not do
Only active documents can be added to a collection. But a document you pause after adding stays a member: still ticked in the editor, marked Paused, invisible to visitors and excluded from chat until you switch it back on.
That is the useful behavior rather than the tidy one. Taking a document out of circulation for a fortnight while it is revised does not silently unpick it from the four collections it belongs to, and does not leave you rebuilding those collections from memory afterwards.
Collections have their own version of the same switch. Turn a collection off and visitors following the link land on a Collection Offline notice, which also takes down its shared-conversation links and its contact form.
What a reader sees
The collection page opens with your name, description and cover, a compact line of statistics, and then Available documents: one row per document with a 16:9 cover, title, category, an optional date, and a preview of its introduction.
Along the toolbar sit the extras you enabled. Downloads holds files you attached to the collection itself, separate from anything inside the documents. Image galleries. Translation links, if you have connected an English and a French version, so readers switch between them in place. And Contact, which emails whichever addresses you nominated.
The contact form has one behavior worth knowing in advance: every recipient address has to confirm it is willing to receive that mail, and until one verifies, the Contact button does not appear to readers at all. No reader ever sends a message into a void, but it does mean a contact form that seems to be missing is usually an unconfirmed address rather than a bug.
Access, and the trade you are making
A collection is Public, Passcode protected, or Token based, with the same per-recipient token controls documents have: an optional name, expiry, and use limit, revocable one at a time.
Then the important part, stated plainly because it surprises people: anyone who can open the collection can open every document in it, including documents whose own access level is stricter. The editor warns you when you bundle protected documents and asks you to acknowledge it before saving.
That is deliberate. A bundle you hand someone should not come apart in their hands, with three documents opening and three demanding a password nobody sent them. But it does mean a collection is a decision about access, not just about presentation. Outside the collection, each document's own level applies again as normal. Signed-in members of your own organization skip the gate entirely. See access levels explained.
Disclaimers can be handled at the collection level too, so readers accept once for the whole set rather than once per document, which is the difference between a formality and an obstacle course.
After it is live
Once a collection is saved, two more sections appear. Conversations shows the chat logs from inside it with the usual moderation controls. Intelligence gives you the full Document Intelligence toolset scoped to the collection, which is where you find out what people were actually looking for across the whole set rather than document by document.
And Sharing gives you the link and a QR code, which is more useful than it sounds the first time you put a collection on a conference slide.