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A copy sits on a disk here, unpublished, until the person whose work it is says otherwise.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, delete it — is the one the museum will act on.
| Site | Maker | Years covered | What the museum holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| A memorial page for John Taylor | unknown (a memorial put up by someone else) | — | 4 files, 35.7 KB |
| aketa.org | Aketa Ocarina | 2001–2026 | 1453 files, 20.2 MB |
| Alan Albright’s letters and pages | Alan Albright | — | 10 files, 480.8 KB |
| anitasocarinas.com | Anita Feng | 2001–2021 | 134 files, 1.2 MB |
| clayz.com | Sandi and Richard Schmidt | 1998–2026 | 434 files, 12.3 MB |
| hamlettocarinas.com | Richard Hamlett | 2013–2025 | 605 files, 13.6 MB |
| ocarina.demon.co.uk | Barry “Baz” Jennings | 1998–2021 | 110 files, 369.7 KB |
| ocarinamasters.org | Barry “Baz” Jennings | 2003–2012 | 134 files, 523.1 KB |
| peruvianwhistles.com | Daniel Statnekov | 2003–2026 | 66 files, 348.0 KB |
| sixthstreetocarina.com + sixthstreetpottery.com | Chris Heuer and Amy Lake | 2001–2026 | 493 files, 13.1 MB |
| theocarinarepository.com | Cambell Baxter | 2013–2020 | 49 files, 2.2 MB |
File counts are measured from the copies themselves, and the years are the span of the Internet Archive’s captures.
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, and the museum has enumerated it but copied nothing. Its founders kept it alive deliberately, and the museum is waiting to hear from them before touching it. A forum is also thousands of authors rather than one, which is a harder rights problem than any site listed above.
Two mailing lists cannot be preserved by anyone. 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. They are simply gone, and the museum records that they existed because that is now all that can be done for them.
Corrections and requests
Write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com. If something here is yours, that address reaches a person who will answer.