General Support: Adding descriptions to collections (default theme)

I would like to add a visible description to the main collections page under the title. I've added the description itself in the Plogger admin. However, my attempts at modifying code to achieve my goal have been less than successful. Attempts are as follows:

I added the following to plog-functions.php:

function plogger_get_collection_desc() {
return $GLOBALS['current_collection']['description'];
}

and added the following to collection.php:

<?php plogger_get_header();
$desc = plogger_get_collection_desc();
?>

When that failed, I tried this:

I added the following to plog-functions.php:

function plogger_get_collection_desc($specialchars = false) {
if ($specialchars) {
return htmlspecialchars(SmartStripSlashes($GLOBALS['current_collection']['description']), ENT_QUOTES);
}
return SmartStripSlashes($GLOBALS['current_collection']['description']);
}

and added the following to collection.php:

<?php plogger_get_header();
$desc = plogger_get_collection_desc();
?>

As may be obvious, I'm flying by the seat of my pants here. Could anyone please walk me through the steps to add descriptions? Again, I'm using the default theme.

Thank you!