Mission and Policies

What The Ocarina Museum promises: what it will and will not publish, how it copies other people’s websites, what it does about the people named in them, and what happens when it gets something wrong.

Version 1.0 — September 14, 2026. This is the museum’s policy as it stands today. Every version is dated, and every change to it is listed at the foot of this page.

Everything below is a commitment rather than an aspiration. Where this page says the museum does something, it means the museum does it now — and where it turns out not to have, it says so on the page where the claim was made rather than quietly repairing it.

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.

Why it exists

Ocarinas are, in general, 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: a website goes when a renewal lapses rather than when its author decides it should, and the people who know most about these instruments are not getting younger.

That is also why the rest of this page is as long as it is. Nearly every commitment below is a limit the museum accepts in order to do that job without taking liberties with the people whose work it depends on.

What the museum collects

Instruments. Most were bought one at a time — from auction sites, dealers, other collectors and makers — and a few came as groups from a single source. They are recorded here by collection, each presented under its owner’s name or alias and remaining that owner’s property. The museum is a record, not a repository: nothing cataloged here is held by it, and being listed does not mean being given away.

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 cataloged with what can be measured or observed about it: who made it, its physical characteristics, and the musical key it sounds in. By convention an 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 catalog and are never published. Whether an instrument is currently owned is public. The name of a previous owner is not published as a matter of course — but where someone asked to be credited when an instrument changed hands, or was promised it, that credit is kept. A promise made to get an instrument is not one the museum gets to forget once it has it.

Nobody has to attach their legal name to their collection to take part.

Personal information about makers and others

Much of what this museum preserves was written by people who are still alive, and old websites carry more about their authors than their authors would put online today. The museum distinguishes between two kinds of detail, and treats them differently.

Facts about a person — when they were born or died, where they studied or worked, who taught them, what they patented or exhibited — are published only when a reputable source has published them already and the museum can say which: a museum, a library, a university, a newspaper, a book, a journal, a public record, or the person’s own words. A date someone mentioned in conversation does not qualify, however reliable the person. Where such a fact appears here, its source appears with it.

Ways to reach or find a person — home addresses, telephone numbers, personal email addresses — are never published. Not even where they have been published elsewhere, and not even where they are easy to find.

That second rule is deliberate and the museum would rather explain it than seem arbitrary. Repeating an address does a different kind of work from repeating a birth year: it makes someone easier to arrive at unannounced. And a museum page carries further and lasts longer than the newsletter, leaflet or personal website a detail first appeared in. Agreeing to appear in a small publication twenty years ago is not agreeing to a permanent public catalog now.

The same applies to anything concerning a child, and to medical or financial detail, whoever published it first.

Two things override all of this. If you would rather something about you did not appear here, it comes down — you do not have to give a reason. And where the museum is unsure, it leaves the detail out and asks.

Whose names appear

Makers are named. Someone who sold instruments under their own name, or whose name was the name of the workshop, is named here as the author of their work — that is what a credit is for, and refusing it would be a strange kind of respect.

Where someone has written about themselves or their work under their own name, the museum names them. An about page, a signed account, a byline they wrote: these are a person presenting themselves to the public, and repeating the credit is the museum’s job rather than an intrusion.

It is more careful where a name is an attribution rather than a presentation — a field filled in by the software a site was built with, a forum handle, a third party’s recollection, a document not written to introduce anyone. A name in a field is not necessarily a claim its owner meant to make, and those wait until the museum has asked. So do people who appear incidentally in preserved material — customers, correspondents, the names in a guest book — who were never the subject of the thing being preserved.

That line takes judgement and the museum will sometimes place it wrongly. It would rather be told so than guess in the direction of publishing.

Naming somebody is not the same as claiming to know what they did. Where the museum can say that a person ran a website but not that they made the instruments on it, it says exactly that.

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. Where a collector describes their own collection, that description is theirs and is confirmed with them.

Accounts of makers are a different thing, and the museum marks them as such. Where it describes someone’s work — how they began, what they made, when — that account is the museum’s own, assembled from what the maker published about themselves, and it has usually not been checked with them. Every such page says so on its face and invites correction. The museum would rather write these and be corrected than wait for a permission that may never come and let the record go by default; but it will not present its own reconstruction as though the subject had approved it.

Preserved material

The museum may copy a website without asking first. It publishes nothing without asking. Those are two different acts and the museum treats them differently on purpose, because confusing them is how material gets lost.

Copying does not wait. A website usually goes not when its owner decides it should but when a renewal lapses, and the maker who would gladly have said yes is often the one least able to answer — elderly, ill, or already dead. The museum copies what any reader’s browser could copy, one file at a time, and it obeys robots.txt, which is how a site actually tells a crawler no. Where anyone tells it to wait or to stop, it does, and it has. A copy sitting on a disk here takes nothing from anybody and can be undone; the loss cannot.

Where a site’s robots.txt says no, that is the end of the automatic part. The museum does not crawl it, and if what is there matters, it writes and asks instead. Someone who says yes to that is saying yes to a copy and to nothing else — publication is a separate question and still needs its own answer, which may perfectly well be no.

Publishing is the act that needs a yes, and that is what the letters are for. Most of what the museum holds is unpublished for exactly this reason, and each preserved site’s page says so in plain words rather than implying that silence is consent.

Some sites carried a notice reserving all rights — no part of this site may be reproduced without written permission. Where one did, the museum still keeps what it holds and still publishes nothing from it, with one narrow exception for work that would otherwise be lost: Orphan works, the last item below.

What follows is what the museum undertakes about that material — some of it about the copy it holds, some about anything it publishes from one:

• The author is named, the original is linked, and every such article ends with an invitation to ask for changes or removal. Where the original is still online the link goes there, because that is where the author would want a reader sent; where it has gone, the link goes to an archived copy and says that is what it is.

• 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, the museum does not publish. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.

• If it is your work and you would rather none of it appeared, it does not. That promise is absolute and needs no reason given.

• Whether the museum also deletes its copy depends on where the copy came from, and it would rather be straight about this than generous in a way that means nothing. Most of what is here was taken from the Internet Archive, which crawled these sites years ago without asking anyone and still holds every page. Deleting this museum’s copy would remove nothing from the internet and change nothing about what anyone can find; it would only cost the record. So the museum keeps those copies, unpublished, and will point you to the Archive’s own exclusion process, which is where that request actually belongs. Where the museum copied a live site itself, rather than taking it from the Archive, that is its own doing and its own responsibility: ask, and the copy is deleted. The museum deletes its own copy. It cannot delete anyone else’s, and would rather say so than imply more. Each preserved site’s page says which of the two it was.

• The copy is of the whole site; what gets published is narrow. A maker’s website is rarely only about ocarinas, and the museum copies all of it — including pages about other work, news, links, the guestbook — because you cannot tell in advance which page explains the thing you needed explained, and because a partial copy loses the context that makes the rest evidence. Only what is the museum’s subject is ever published, and each page says so.

• The museum does not sell, license or advertise against other people’s work. To advertise against something is the publishing trade’s phrase for selling advertising placed alongside it — a banner beside an article, a sponsor’s name on a page. Nothing preserved here is placed behind a payment, sold on, licensed out, or used to carry advertising of any kind.

  It does not mean the museum will not advertise itself. Announcing an exhibition, a new article, or a site newly preserved — online, in print, or on a wall — is the museum doing its job, and a maker whose work is here is usually the person most glad to see it seen. The promise is against making money from someone’s work, not against drawing attention to it.

  The long-term hope is a physical museum, which may one day mean a door and a ticket. That would be the museum charging for its own building and its own labor. It is not a license to sell someone else’s photographs.

• These promises belong to the material, not to whoever is keeping it. If this museum becomes an institution, or passes to anybody else, the terms on this page go with it: the permissions here were given to a policy, not to a person, and a maker who said yes in 2026 said yes to this. Every right this page gives you — to have your work kept unpublished, corrected, taken down, or, where the museum copied your live site itself, deleted — is a right you keep against whoever holds the material next, on the same terms and by the same distinction set out above.

  It would be dishonest to pretend a web page can bind whoever comes next. What it can do is leave the terms stated and dated, so that anyone who gave permission can point at exactly what they agreed to, and so that a successor who departs from them has to do it in the open. The museum also keeps a written record of who granted what, and when, for the same reason.

• The museum does not publish a machine translation of a whole article as somebody’s words. Translating a page of a maker’s writing and presenting it as what they said is a claim the museum cannot stand behind, and an error there is not a typo but a misquotation that will be repeated by others. Shorter passages are a different matter, and machine translation is genuinely useful: where it is used, it is labeled as unchecked machine output, so a reader knows how much weight it will carry. The museum may also write its own summary of a foreign-language source in its own voice, and says when it has.

• The museum records where each file came from. Where it copied a site, it keeps a list of every file held, the address it came from, and the day or the archived capture it came from, with a checksum. Around nine files in ten are recorded this way and the proportion is rising. Some of what is here is not a copy of a website at all — interviews transcribed from a defunct forum, correspondence given directly to the museum — and for those the question does not arise in the same form; their source is described on the page instead.

• Where sources disagree, the museum records the disagreement rather than choosing. Several dates here are given two or three ways, with each source named, because choosing silently between them would claim a certainty nobody has.

• Orphan works — where nobody can be found to ask. An orphan work is one still in copyright whose rights holder cannot be identified or traced after a reasonable search; the term is the standard one, used by the US Copyright Office and in the UK and EU licensing schemes. Where a work is orphaned and its original terms reserved all rights, the museum’s default is the same as everywhere else: keep it, publish nothing. It departs from that only when the writing would otherwise be lost, when the author’s own wish that it survive is on record, and when the search for anyone entitled to speak for it has been made and written down. It then publishes without commercial use, names the authors, sets out the whole position on the page itself, and takes the work down at once should anyone entitled to ask ever wish it.

How the museum makes its copies

Most copies come from the Internet Archive, which has already done the collecting. Where a site is still online and its coverage in the Archive is thinning, the museum sometimes copies it directly. When it does:

• It says who it is. The program identifies itself as theocarinamuseum.com preservation, with a contact address, so that anyone reading their server logs can see what it is and write to the museum about it.
• It reads robots.txt and obeys it, and where a site asks crawlers to wait a certain time between requests, it waits at least that long.
• It takes one file at a time, with a pause between, because these are small sites on modest hosting and a museum has no business being a burden.
• If the people behind a site ask the museum to wait, it waits — and it has, rather than copying first and asking afterwards.
• If they ask it to stop, it stops, and its own copy is deleted.

Corrections

The museum gets things wrong. Dates, names, attributions, the spelling of a maker’s name — mistakes are made here and go uncorrected until somebody who knows better says so.

And it sometimes breaks the rules on this page. When that happens, the correction is written on the page where the claim was made, dated, saying what was wrong and what has changed. Not a silent edit, and not a note filed where nobody reads it: a rule the museum has broken and quietly repaired is worth less than one it has broken and left the evidence of.

It has already happened once. In September 2026 this page said the museum’s crawler identifies itself. On one site it had not — through an oversight the program sent a browser’s user-agent string, so that site’s logs show an ordinary visitor rather than this museum. The program was fixed the same day, and the correction stands at the top of that site’s own page, together with an offer to delete the copy. It was the sort of failure that would have been easy to repair without telling anyone, which is the reason it was not.

If you find a mistake, or if something here is yours and should not be, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.

Changes to this page

Every version of this page is dated, and every change is recorded here. A policy that can be revised silently is not a policy, and the rule under Corrections applies to this page as much as to any other.

Version 1.0 — September 14, 2026

The first published version of the museum’s policy.