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.

1. The Staffordshire Hoard Daniel Pett dpett@britishmuseum.org

2. Nothing could have prepared me {…} I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship. – Duncan Slarke

3. The Hoard

4. ......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)

5. £3,285,000 Split 50:50 between landowner and finder (after being declared Treasure, and a Midlands Museum was identified as acquirer)

6. £50 - £100 Split 50:50 between landowner and finder (after being declared Treasure, and an acquiring museum is found) Normally, Treasure comes in at around

7. 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

8. “A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS” www.textpattern.com Opensource!

9. Textpattern in the wild (Heritage) Thames Discovery Palestine Exploration Fund Prescot Street Dig

10. Simple interfaces

11. Combined these

14. Flickrapi leveraged

15. Village game

16. 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 Launch

17. Flickr daily views @ launch * As far as I am aware, this doesn’t include API views, of which the website made use and I used elsewhere.

18. Referrers and search [flickr] Always get lots of searches for our female Time Team staff Very few people clicked through from staffordshirehoard.org.uk – were they stuck in the silo there?

20. Flickr stats Processed from - http://stats.vispillo.org

21. Shallow surface find

22. New images captured

23. Kevin Leahy at work

25. Unpacked vs packed

27. Fred Johnson in his new suit

37. 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

38. Front page feature bbc.co.uk The BBC broke the embargo, and revealed the findspot! The site was sanitised by launch day.

42. Daily Telegraph: 25th September 2009

44. photograph(s)

45. geospatial attributes

46. multi level access

48. The end. www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk or www.finds.org.uk Some new pictures behind the scenes pictures of the hoard were released yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/ CC-NC-SA licenced