mcg spring meeting presentation: the staffordshire hoard
DESCRIPTION
The Staffordshire Hoard was uncovered in July 2009 and was launched publicly on the 24th September with a hastily assembled website. This paper tells the story.TRANSCRIPT
Nothing could have prepared me {…} I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship. – Duncan Slarke
The Hoard
......for one warrior stripped the other, looted Ongentheow's iron mail-coat, his hard sword-hilt, his helmet too, and carried graith to King Hygelac; he accepted the prize, promised fairly that reward would come, and kept his word. .... they let the ground keep that ancestral treasure, gold under gravel, gone to earth, as useless to men now as it ever was. ~ Beowulf (Heaney)
£3,285,000Split 50:50 between landowner and finder
(after being declared Treasure, and a Midlands Museum was identified as acquirer)
£50 - £100Split 50:50 between landowner and
finder (after being declared Treasure, and an acquiring museum is found)
Normally, Treasure comes in at around
Web development
• 1 week before inquest• Very loose brief
provided by Staffs CC– Black!!– White writing– Set of photos provided
from Dan Buxton & Dave Rowan
– Everything to be released under CC-NC-SA
• Cost £0• Built in 12 hours with
help from Kate Kelland• Images to be offloaded
onto flickr for resilience• Hosted on our new
servers• Built with customised
textpattern (PHP) CMS
“A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS” www.textpattern.com
Opensource!
Textpattern in the wild (Heritage)
Thames Discovery Palestine Exploration Fund Prescot Street Dig
Simple interfaces
Combined these
Flickr api leveraged
Village game
Initial impact
• 2000 conn/per sec to server on launch day
• Never went offline• Only experienced slow
performance• Content caching helped get
the site through the initial onslaught
• ¼ million visitors in 3 days
Day Pages
24/09 1,306,545
25/09 1,772,572
26/09 553,285
27/09 351,070
28/09 267,385
29/09 164,039
[..] Present ~ 25,000
Launch
Flickr daily views @ launchDay Flickr views
24/09 281,970
25/09 161,630
26/09 59,200
27/09 47,900
28/09 32,770
29/09 22,030
* As far as I am aware, this doesn’t include API views, of which the website made use and I used elsewhere.
Referrers and search [flickr]
Very few people clicked through from staffordshirehoard.org.uk – were they stuck in the silo there?
Always get lots of searches for our female Time Team staff
Flickr stats
Processed from - http://stats.vispillo.org
Shallow surface find
New images captured
Kevin Leahy at work
Unpacked vs packed
Fred Johnson in his new suit
Misleading press
• Never any suggestion BM would acquire
• Stated from the start we would only step in as last resort
• Out of c.800 cases we acquired 10 last year
Front page feature bbc.co.uk
The BBC broke the embargo, and revealed the findspot! The site was sanitised by launch day.
Daily Telegraph: 25th September 2009
www.finds.org.uk
All hoard details will go on here. Each record will have:• full description• photograph(s)• geospatial attributes• multi level access• ability to study objects with comparanda
A typical record
The end.
www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk or www.finds.org.ukSome new pictures behind the scenes pictures of the hoard were
released yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/
CC-NC-SA licenced