The Ocarina Repository

Cambell Baxter’s website of 2013, its seven interviews with makers, and what the museum has kept from it.

A note from the museum

This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved material from. It is not by the person who made that site.

The Ocarina Repository was at theocarinarepository.com, and its footer read “© Cambell Baxter 2013”. Someone signing as Cambell answers readers in its comments. The name was recovered from the Internet Archive.

The site was active in 2013. The Archive’s captures run from May 2013 to February 2020, and it is gone now.

What the site held

Its substance was a run of interviews with ocarina makers, conducted and written up in 2013: an outsider going to the people who make these instruments and asking them how and why. The questions are the same each time, which makes the answers comparable in a way that rarely happens in this field.

What the museum has preserved

The seven interviews, in the museum’s own format:

Each is reproduced as written, with its author named and the archived original linked, and each ends with an invitation to ask for changes or removal.

Held privately as provenance: the pages transcribed from the Internet Archive, and the photographs that came with them.

49 files, 2.2 MB.

12 pages transcribed to plain text
35 photographs and illustrations
2 small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers

The Archive’s captures of theocarinarepository.com run from 2013 to 2020, across about 76 days and some 250 distinct addresses. The site is one of several the museum has copied.

What it has not preserved, and why

Photographs of people. The interviews carried portraits and group shots, and those are not republished: the people in them have given no permission. Seven images were removed on that ground. Photographs of instruments are kept.

The rest of the site — its introduction, its pieces on holding and playing an ocarina, its opening announcement — is not here. The museum took the interviews because they are irreplaceable primary material about named makers; a general article about how to hold an ocarina is not.

On permission

Cambell Baxter could not be found, and the site carried a bare copyright notice stating no terms. The interviews were published here with the author credited, the original linked, and a standing offer to take them down — the museum’s policy for preserved material where a rights holder cannot be reached.

That covers the writing. It does not cover the answers: an interview has two authors, and the words of the person interviewed are their own. Six of the seven may be living, and the museum is writing to them. Where one asks for a change or a removal, it will be made.

The site in the Internet Archive