Mission and Policies
Mission
The Ocarina Museum records ocarinas — what each instrument is, who made it, and, when possible, how it sounds — and preserves writing about them that would otherwise be lost.
It exists because ocarinas are poorly documented. What is known about a maker or an instrument tends to live in one person’s memory, or on one website, and it is easily lost.
What the museum collects
Instruments, from private collections around the world. Each collection is presented under its owner’s name or alias, and remains its owner’s property; the museum is a record, not a repository.
Alongside the instruments it holds photographs contributed by collectors, video of instruments being played, and articles — both the museum’s own writing and material preserved from ocarina websites that have gone offline.
An instrument is catalogued with what can be measured or observed about it: who made it, its physical characteristics, and the musical key it sounds in. Every instrument is photographed against a plain background beside a United States quarter, 0.955 inches (24.26 mm) across, so that its size can be judged from the photograph. Each is given a permanent accession number, which does not change and whose page remains at the same address.
What the museum does not publish
Acquisition and ownership records — what was paid, to whom, when, and through what order — are kept separately from the catalogue and are never published. Whether an instrument is currently owned is public; the name of a previous owner is not.
A contributor may be credited under an alias. Nobody has to attach their legal name to their collection to take part.
Other people’s work
Not everything here is the museum’s own, and the difference is always marked.
Every photograph carries a credit, the museum’s own included. A photograph lent by another collector appears with that person’s permission and says so. A biography is confirmed with its subject before it is published.
Preserved material
Where an ocarina website has gone offline, the museum may preserve writing from it. When it does:
- The author is named, the original is linked in the Internet Archive, and every such article ends with an invitation to ask for changes or removal.
- The text is reproduced verbatim. Where something is wrong — a misspelled name, a mistaken date — it is corrected in a note, never silently in the author’s words.
- Photographs showing people’s faces are not republished, because the people in them have not given permission. Photographs of instruments are.
- Where a rights holder has declined, or cannot be found and the original terms forbid copying, the museum keeps its copy privately and does not publish it. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, or concerns you, or is yours and should not be, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.