What is an effective collection browse user experience/design?

[corylown]

Out of the box ArcLight provides a separate collection list view. We removed links to this view in this PR (#480) opting instead to link to a results view with a level=Collection facet applied.

We're not sure what people expect or what would be most useful when browsing a list of collections. We think this may deserve user research and design attention.

For context, the out of the box collection browse list looks like this. Potential problems with this view is that it does not list all the collections and does not provide a way to page through the entire list within this context. Additionally, the order in which they're presented seems random. (You can still get this is view here: https://archives.stanford.edu/repositories/ars)

In our production beta site we are instead linking to a results view like this (https://archives.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Blevel%5D%5B%5D=Collection&f%5Brepository%5D%5B%5D=Archive+of+Recorded+Sound):