STQRY Collect overview

Where STQRY Collect wins

Name our best live Collect sites and what each one shows
Name our competitors and how we're different
Answer the questions prospects push back with

Manawatū Heritage

Palmerston North City Library
On Collect since 2017
The public adds photos and stories
English and te reo Māori

The Manawatū Heritage home page, with a search bar, Explore and Contribute menus, a Māori and English switch, and tiles of a 1970s mayor reading to schoolchildren and a 1909 house plan.

Manawatū Heritage, at manawatuheritage.pncc.govt.nz, is our flagship. It's run by Palmerston North City Library's heritage team and holds the city's archives, photographs, books and postcards.

Show a prospect three things. Search for a street or a family name and open a record with a fuzzy date. Open Contribute, where the public uploads photos or writes stories for the heritage team to review. Then switch the site into te reo Māori.

Palmerston North keep investing in it. They've paid for authority files and an archives management module on top of their plan. A second site, for the city archives, launches at the end of October 2026. Much of what Collect does today, they asked for first.

The council also has a STQRY app, Manawatū Heritage Tours. Its stories are built in Builder, because Collect content can't appear in an app or on a kiosk yet.

More live examples

Kete Horowhenua, a council archive
Feilding Heritage, a district library
NSW Supreme Court, alongside its app
Friends of Minidoka, launching soon

The Kete Horowhenua home page, with tiles of the Mangahao Dam construction site in 1924, Levin in 1981 and Foxton railway station.

Kete Horowhenua (horowhenua.kete.net.nz) is Horowhenua District Council's community archive. It started on Kete, an open-source platform, and moved to Collect in 2019. If a prospect mentions Kete, it's a migration we've already done.

Feilding and District Heritage (feildingheritage.nz) is run by Manawatu District Libraries, Palmerston North's neighbours. It looks and works much like Kete Horowhenua, which makes it a good second example for a small council.

The NSW Department of Justice runs a Supreme Court collection on Collect, added in December 2025 alongside their STQRY app.

Friends of Minidoka preserve the history of the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho. They bought an app in 2025 and are building their Collect site now, starting with about 300 records.

Sncewips Heritage Museum, of Westbank First Nation in Canada, is also building a site. Don't name them outside STQRY. Their collection holds sensitive community material.

Who do we compete with?

Competitor	What it is
Recollect	Our closest match, from NZ
eHive, PastPerfect	Cheap catalogues for small museums
Islandora, Omeka	Open source, needs a developer

What do prospects push back with?

"Can some items be for our community only?"
"eHive is free."
"$5,000 for setup?"
"Can we search inside our PDFs?"

"Can some items be for our community only?" Not yet. Indigenous groups in New Zealand, Australia and Canada ask for this more than anything else. Find out exactly what they need to restrict and who should see it, then post it in #product-knowledge on Slack.

"eHive is free." eHive is a catalogue. Collect is the community's own website, with their branding, contributions, fuzzy dates and authority files, and they own all the data.

"$5,000 for setup?" Setup covers configuring their fields, theme and site with them. Importing their records is quoted on its own, because every collection arrives in a different state.

"Can we search inside our PDFs?" Not yet. Collect reads the text from scanned documents, but searching inside PDFs isn't built yet.

Discounts on setup or subscription go through Glen.

Check your understanding

Which site do you show a prospect first, and what do you show them?
A council archive runs on Kete. What do you tell them?
A First Nation museum wants some records visible only to members. What now?

Manawatū Heritage. Search for a street or family name, open Contribute, and switch to te reo Māori.

Horowhenua moved from Kete to Collect in 2019. We've done this migration before.

Restricted community access isn't built yet. Find out what they need to restrict and for whom, and post it in #product-knowledge.

Connecting People, Places and Stories.

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