Managing your Curations library

Your Curations library is where gathered content lives — stored, reviewed, and ready to insert into newsletters. Content arrives via RSS feeds, the browser extension, the Letterhead API, or manual entry. For the full picture of what the Curations area can do, see Working in Curations.

Explore the library

Each curation item carries an image, title, website name, original URL, excerpt, author, tags, source, and publication date. Excerpts are automatically cleaned to plain text, so stray formatting from the original page doesn’t leak into your newsletter. Tags appear directly on each card — up to three at once, with a +N indicator when there are more (hover to see the rest) — so you can scan the library and identify already-tagged content without opening items individually. To find and organize content, you can:

• Search by title, excerpt, or URL
• Filter by status (Curated or Not Curated), publication date, feed source, website name, tags, Exclude Tags, Topics, or source type (RSS Feed, Browser Extension, Data Feed, WordPress, or Application — Letterhead’s catch-all for manual entry, AI-generated content, and product feeds like Shopify or Stripe, not only API-created content)
• Sort your library by Newest first or Oldest first using the Sort control
• Curate or uncurate an item by toggling the bookmark icon on its card — only curated articles are available to the Curation block in your newsletter
• Delete an item — sparingly. If you might re-add the same URL later, uncurate instead of deleting.

When working at the company level — choosing content for a block or setting up a block that fills itself — you draw from everything curated across all your company’s newsletters, not just the current one. A website name filter alongside the library narrows the selection to content from a particular publication, so a block can pull only matching articles as it sends.

Edit a curation item

Tagging, like every other edit, happens after you open the item — there’s no way to add or change a tag directly from the library view itself.

1. Open Curations and find the item with search or filters.
2. Click it to open the item.
3. Edit the image (see Set a story’s image), title, website name, original URL, excerpt, author, or tags — adding existing tags or creating new ones — right there.

Combined with automatic IAB categorization and per-feed default tags, consistent tagging makes content fast to find when you’re composing.

You can also update curations programmatically via the curations API endpoint, and add custom fields for richer metadata.

Choose which newsletters a company-wide curation appears in

A company-wide curation is a single shared item rather than a copy per newsletter, so when you open one you can also say where it belongs. Look for Active in channels beneath the item’s details:

• Leave it unset and the curation is available in every newsletter in your company.
• Pick specific newsletters and it appears only in those — it stays out of everyone else’s library and content blocks.

Because it’s one shared item, editing it changes it everywhere. Retitle a company-wide curation, swap its image, or correct its link, and every newsletter showing that item picks up the change. There’s no per-newsletter version of a shared story — so if one newsletter needs its own wording, or needs to point readers at a different URL, curate that story separately for that newsletter instead of editing the shared copy.

Add an article manually

Manual entry is the most direct way to get a story into your library — useful when there’s no feed to connect, a page can’t be crawled, or you want full control over how the item reads.

1. Open Curations and go to your content.
2. Click Add Content.
3. Fill in the article’s details: title, image (see Set a story’s image), website, original URL, excerpt, author, and tags.
4. Click Add to save it to your library.

Once added, the item behaves like any other curation — you can edit, filter, and tag it, and pull it into newsletters with a content block set to From Library.

Tip

Just want a one-off URL in a single newsletter? Use a content block in the composer and choose From URL — see when to use which.

Set a story’s image

Whether you’re adding a story by hand or changing the picture on one already in your library, the Image field offers the same two routes:

1. Choose Choose an image.
2. Pick Upload to bring in a new file from your computer, or Choose from gallery to reuse a picture your team has already used in a newsletter — see Reuse images from your company image gallery.
3. If you chose the gallery, search or browse for the picture you want and select it.

The story shows the picture you picked straight away. To swap it for a different one, remove the current picture first — Remove Image clears the field and brings the Choose an image options back. Anything you upload here also joins your company image gallery, so it’s there to reuse next time.

Automatic IAB categories

Separately from the tags you control, Letterhead assigns IAB categories — the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s industry-standard taxonomy for classifying digital content — to everything in your library. It runs in the background on all content, with nothing to activate or configure, and the categories can’t be created or edited.

Why it’s useful:

• Effortless organization — content is categorized the moment it enters your library.
• Powerful filtering — filter and sort by precise IAB tags, like showing only “Science & Education” or “Travel” content.
• Layered accuracy — a fast keyword pass gets a category on your content right away, and an AI classification pass reviews the same content to refine or correct it.
• Industry standard — classification follows official IAB standards, the same taxonomy advertisers use.

Categorization runs as two independent passes over your content. A fast keyword pass compares keywords extracted from your content against defined keyword sets for major topics like Health, Politics, or Business. A separate AI classification pass reviews the same content and can add to or override what the keyword pass found. Because the two passes run independently with no guaranteed order, a category can shift shortly after an item first appears in your library as the second pass finishes. The final category is limited to the Tier 2 level so filtering stays simple.

Prefer to have it done for you?

Penpal can add items to your library for you in conversation — try “curate this URL” or “find articles about local elections”. See how Penpal works.