@djsundog i think there is an assumption that any large collection will require some searching to navigate, and search is often a bit fine-tuned, so there hasn't been a ton of work to standardize navigating and exploring collections across platforms
but assuming you have found a resource and have a link to it, there has been a lot of work into how you can then reuse that resource in lots of places
@djsundog https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/ is very old but still pretty widely used i think for querying the contents of collections; might be somewhere to look for that piece