After some consideration, I've decided to abandon the litref.xq library completely, and handle literary reference links using the existing search.xq library. This is working well. I can now constrain the search to a specific subcollection, and specify an xml:id for the target item; then the search page gets all the distinct values of the text with a pointer to that id within that subcollection and searches for them. It also brings back a wider kwic view. One remaining feature needs to be added: where a subcollection has been specified, that should perhaps appear on the search results page, so that you can also narrow your search results by subcollection anyway.