Preserved Websites

Ocarina websites the museum has copied before they could disappear, what each copy contains, and whether it may be published.

Ocarina making is a small craft, and much of what is known about it was written down once, by the maker, on a website. When the hosting lapses — and it always lapses — that writing goes. The instruments outlive their documentation.

So the museum copies these sites. Some of them it can publish from and some it cannot, and that distinction is the whole point of this page: preserving something and publishing it are two different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.

A copy sits on a disk here, unpublished, until the person whose work it is says otherwise. For makers who have died with no one to speak for their work, the museum’s decision is set out in full on the site’s own page. For makers who are living, the copy waits.

This page exists partly so that those makers can see what exists. If your site is listed here, everything the museum holds of it is described below, and the answer you give — publish it, keep it private, correct it — is the one the museum will act on.

What becomes of the copy itself is a separate question, and the answer depends on where the copy came from. Most of what is here was taken from the Internet Archive, which crawled these sites years ago and still holds every page; deleting this museum’s copy would remove nothing from the internet and would only cost the record, so those copies are kept, unpublished. Where the museum copied a live site itself, that is its own doing and its own responsibility, and the copy goes if you ask. Each site’s page below says which of the two it was.

Site Maker Captures held What the museum holds What the museum has published
A memorial page for John Taylor unknown (a memorial put up by someone else) — 4 files, 35.7 KB none
aketa.org Aketa Ocarina 2001–2026 17295 files, 240.3 MB none from the mirror
Alan Albright’s memoir and letters Alan Albright — 9 files, 480.5 KB 4 articles
anitasocarinas.com Anita Feng 2001–2021 173 files, 2.5 MB a chronology + a page about the site
bearpawflutes.com unknown — † 785 files, 28.5 MB a page about the site
clay-wood-winds.com Robin L. Hodgkinson — † 1462 files, 70.2 MB a chronology + a page about the site
clayz.com Sandi and Richard Schmidt 1998–2026 † 414 files, 12.4 MB 2 articles + a chronology + a page about the site
doubleocarina.com The North Country Workshop — 187 files, 2.3 MB a chronology + a page about the site
dunster.com Karen Dunster — 309 files, 3.0 MB a chronology + a page about the site
hamlettocarinas.com Richard Hamlett 2013–2025 700 files, 16.7 MB a chronology + a page about the site
hindocarina.com Charles Hind — 2506 files, 122.8 MB a page about the site
louisth.selfhost.com Louis — 1010 files, 298.3 MB a page about the site
ocarina.demon.co.uk Barry “Baz” Jennings 1998–2021 102 files, 293.6 KB A History of the Ocarina + a page about the site
ocarinaarena.com Diane and Kristie — 43 files, 3.2 MB a page about the site
ocarinamasters.org Barry “Baz” Jennings 2003–2012 297 files, 1.2 MB a page about the site
ocarinamusic.com Hans Rotter — 47 files, 210.3 KB a page about the site
paintandplayocarina.com unknown — 74 files, 793.4 KB a page about the site
peruvianwhistles.com Daniel Statnekov 2003–2021 99 files, 651.6 KB none (but cited by a published page)
sixthstreetocarina.com + sixthstreetpottery.com Chris Heuer and Amy Lake 2001–2026 † 1058 files, 33.2 MB a chronology + a page about the site
tenraiocarina.com Tenrai Ocarina 2011–2024 69 files, 2.6 MB a chronology + a page about the site
theocarinarepository.com Cambell Baxter 2013–2020 35 files, 2.1 MB 6 interviews + a page about the site

File counts are measured from the copies themselves. Captures held is the span of the dated captures in this museum’s copy, which is not the same as the span the Internet Archive covers, and not the same as how long the site was alive. Published says what, if anything, of that site is readable on this website; an em dash means nothing is, which is the case for most of them.

Each site’s own page then breaks the holding down, and two of those lines are worth explaining because they sound alike and are not:

None of the three counts robots.txt or a sitemap. Those are instructions for crawlers rather than anything a reader saw, and until September 14, 2026 this museum was counting them as transcribed pages — which is why almost every site on this list appeared to have exactly one.

† marks a domain that changed hands after its maker stopped. The later captures under these addresses are whoever bought the name — a content farm, a spam blog — and not the maker’s work. The museum keeps those pages because they were at the address, says so on each site’s page, and publishes none of them.

How the copies are made

From the Internet Archive where a site is already gone, and directly from the site where it is still answering — politely, one request at a time, identifying the museum, and respecting what a site asks crawlers not to take.

Pages are kept as the bytes that came back rather than cleaned up, because cleaning up is a change and a copy that has been changed is worth less. Files are counted honestly: a 1990s website contains hundreds of buttons, rules and spacer images, and calling those photographs would inflate every number on this page.

The copies are not online. They are not in the museum’s public repository, they are not uploaded with the site, and they are backed up offline.

Some of the sites listed here are still live, and are copied anyway. Waiting until a site goes down means waiting until the only copy is somebody else’s — and the Internet Archive’s coverage of a small maker’s site is thinner than its span of years suggests. A site can be indexed across twenty years and still have been visited on only a few dozen days, which is to say that whether any given page survives was decided by whether a crawler happened to pass while it was up.

What is not here yet

The Ocarina Network, the forum, is the largest body of ocarina writing still standing. Its administrators gave the museum permission to copy it in September 2026, after finding they could not produce a database export of their own forum. That copying has begun.

The copy is a reference, not a source of pages. The museum does not expect to publish anything from the forum. It is being kept so that the museum can search it, check claims against it, and follow what people said there back to wherever they got it — a great deal of what circulates about the ocarina’s history turns out to trace to one or two forum posts, and those posts usually got it from somewhere else.

Permission to copy is not permission to publish, and the administrators could not grant the second if they wanted to: a forum is thousands of authors, not one. If anything from it is ever quoted here, the person who wrote it will have been asked. Member profiles are not copied at all.

Two mailing lists are missing. The Ocarinaclub, founded by Sandi and Richard Schmidt on February 13, 1999, and the Ocarina Making group both lived on Yahoo Groups, which deleted its archives in December 2020 — twenty-one years of messages in the first of them. The Internet Archive holds none of either, and the museum has found no copy.

That is not the same as saying no copy exists. These groups went out by email, and mail sits in mailboxes for decades; members exported them, and people kept the exports. If you have any of it — a mail archive, an export file, or just a folder of old messages — please write. This is the one thing on this page that a reader is more likely to be holding than the museum is.

Corrections and requests

Write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com. If something here is yours, that address reaches a person who will answer.

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