A colophon is the note at the back of a manuscript that tells you how the book was made. Here is how each day's objects are found and chosen: plainly, and then technically.
Where they come from
Every object is drawn from the Victoria and Albert Museum's public collections API. The museum holds millions of things, and in a sample we took, roughly 98 in 100 were off display, tucked in storage and seen by almost no one. Those are the ones this site is interested in.
A gate, not a score
We do not rank objects by how obscure or forgotten they are; that would be a fiction we'd
have to invent. Instead there is a simple gate. An object qualifies only if it is currently off display (in the API, onDisplay == false) and has a good,
high-resolution image (imageResolution == "high"). Everything that passes the
gate is treated as equal, and the day's picks are taken from it uniformly at random.
Thin, half-written catalogue records are welcome; that under-description is part of the point.
Finding them without a map
The collection is too large to walk through: the API refuses to page past its
ten-thousandth result, and it offers no way to reproduce a random shuffle. So instead we
periodically draw objects at random (the API's random=1), keep the ones that
pass the gate, sort them by kind (tiles, vases, daggers, earrings), and store nothing but
their ID numbers.
One kind a day, the same for everyone
Each day, a fixed recipe (a hash of the feed's name and the date) chooses that day's kind from a curated list, then picks five distinct objects from the stored IDs. It is deterministic: every visitor sees the same five, and they hold steady until midnight in London, when the hash changes and a new set surfaces. Only at that moment is each object's description and image fetched fresh from the museum, so nothing here is a stale copy.
No servers, nothing watching
The whole site is built ahead of time into plain pages and served from a CDN. The museum's own image servers deliver the pictures straight to your browser, hotlinked, never copied. There is no backend, no database, no tracking, and no accounts. Just objects, brought up into the light for a day.