Curating Story Collections

Story Collections holds a family’s short pieces — a few minutes each, in the tellers’ own voices. Where the Cinema Gallery makes a handful of finished films feel rare, this room makes many short ones feel connected.

That connecting is the work, and it is yours. This page covers the two fields that do it, and the handful of things that quietly stop a story reaching the wall.

Read How Curation Works first if you haven’t — the working model there applies here too.

People and Themes build the room

Every story can link to the people who tell it and the themes it belongs to. These are not tags for searching later. They are what the room is assembled from, and leaving them empty changes what a visitor sees.

Link them, and the room composes itself three ways:

• Theme collections. Each theme with enough stories becomes a band on the wall — the theme name, then its stories together.
• A portrait. The person with the most stories is gathered into a portrait band: their picture, who they are to the family, and everything they tell, in one place.
• Where this leads. At the end of a story, the room offers up to two threads onward — a different voice on the same theme (“Margaret tells it differently”), and more from one of its themes.

Leave them empty, and none of that can form. The stories still appear, and nothing is lost — but they arrive as one flat run of separate pieces, with no collections, no portrait, and no threads. It’s the plainest version of the room.

Note

A story linking neither a person nor a theme is what we call unsurfaced. It isn’t hidden or held back — it drops to the single-stories strip at the bottom of the wall, marked “not yet part of a thread”. That strip is a signal to you, not a failure: it’s the room saying these pieces are waiting to be placed.

The two-story rule

This is the one that surprises people, so it’s worth being exact.

A theme needs at least two published stories before it becomes a collection. A theme with only one is deliberately held back — it isn’t shown as a collection of one.

That’s honesty over filler, the same instinct as an empty curator note staying empty. A band announcing “The War Years” above a single clip promises a collection the family doesn’t have yet. So a one-story theme waits, and its story sits in the singles strip until a second one joins it — at which point the collection appears on its own.

Tip

If you’ve tagged a theme and it isn’t on the wall, count its published stories. One is the usual answer. Two is the threshold.

Only published stories count — including toward that threshold

A story’s Status must be published to reach the wall. A story with any other status never appears.

The part worth knowing: an unpublished story is invisible to the counting as well. Two stories on a theme with one still in draft is a one-story theme, and the collection won’t form. If a band you expected is missing, check the statuses before the links.

Themes are a shared vocabulary, not free text

Themes exist only as records in the Themes table. You can’t type a theme onto a story — you link it, choosing from what’s there, and add a new record when the family genuinely has a new thread.

That constraint is on purpose. It’s what lets “The War Years” mean the same thing across every story, and it stops the room fragmenting into near-duplicates (war years, War Years, the war) that each fall under the two-story threshold and so never appear at all.

The same is true of people: a person is a record, and the stories link to it.

Linking a film so it plays

Caution

Vimeo ID is the field the player reads. It holds the film’s number and nothing else — 864165270. If it is empty, the story shows its title, its length and a play button that does nothing, because there is no film for the player to load.

Vimeo URL sits beside it and is best left empty. The ID is all the museum needs: it asks Vimeo for everything else, including the private code a hidden film requires. Only fill the URL in if a film lives on a Vimeo account that is not StoryKeep’s, and then paste the full Share address including the code after the number.

To get the number: open the film on its own page in Vimeo first, then read the address. It looks like vimeo.com/864165270 — the digits at the end are the ID.

Danger

The showcase trap. If you press Share while browsing inside a showcase, Vimeo hands you the address of the showcase — the whole collection — not the film. It looks entirely correct, and it has caught us twice.

A film address is vimeo.com/ followed by numbers only. If you see /showcase/ anywhere in it, it points at the collection, and no film will play.

The film must not be password-protected

A password-protected film will not play inside the museum. Vimeo asks the viewer for the password itself, inside the player, and the museum has no way to answer on their behalf — the family member simply meets a password box.

In Vimeo, under Who can watch this video?, a story’s film needs to be either “Hide from Vimeo” or “Anyone”. “Hide from Vimeo” is the usual choice: the film can’t be found on vimeo.com or through search, and plays only where it has been placed.

“Only people with the private link” now works too, as of 29 July 2026. That setting hides the film behind an extra code in its address, and the museum used to have no way to reach it, so a film set that way stayed dark. The museum now asks Vimeo for that code itself, using nothing but the ID. You do not need to find it or paste it anywhere.

The one setting that still cannot work is “Only me” (private). The museum can read such a film’s details, so its title and length appear and the card looks healthy, but the player shows a Vimeo sign-in wall to the family. If a story looks right and refuses to play, check this first.

The fields, in short

Stories table:

Field	What it does	Needed
Title	The card and player heading	Yes
Vimeo ID	The film itself — numbers only	Yes
Vimeo URL	Leave empty. Only for a film hosted outside StoryKeep’s Vimeo	No
Status	Only published reaches the wall	Yes
People	Who tells it — builds the portrait and the speaker line	Strongly recommended
Themes	What it belongs to — builds the collections	Strongly recommended
Transcript	The telling, shown beside the film	Recommended
Pull Quote	One line lifted out, set large in the telling	Optional
Poster Still	The card image; falls back to Vimeo’s own if left empty	Optional
Duration	The length shown on the card	Optional

People: a name, a portrait, and how they relate to the family. Themes: a name and a short description.

Note

Neon ID appears on both People and Themes. It’s filled in by the system when your work is published — never type into it or clear it.

A sensible order of work

1. Add the films as stories — title, Vimeo ID, and set Status to published when the piece is ready.

2. Write the telling — the transcript, and a pull quote where one line deserves lifting.

3. Add the people as records, then link each story to whoever tells it.

4. Decide the themes — the threads this family actually has. Two or more stories each, or they won’t form a collection.

5. Check the wall in the sandbox: the bands you expected, a portrait, and a singles strip that only holds pieces you haven’t placed yet.

Where to go next

• How Curation Works — the working model, and when your changes appear to visitors.
• Going Live — moving a room from the sandbox onto the family’s museum.
• Setting Up a Room — configuring a room in Airtable from scratch.