Karen Dunster
What the museum holds of dunster.com, the site that described her whimsical animal ocarinas, and on what terms.
A note from the museum
This page records what the museum holds of a website that is no longer online, and what it may do with it. It is not by the people who made that site, and nothing from the site is republished here.
The museum’s account of her work, with a chronology, is at Karen Dunster’s Ocarinas.
Karen Dunster makes ocarinas by hand in whimsical animal shapes, and she was doing it by the 1990s. Her work was described on dunster.com.
What the site held
The site was not a maker’s site. It was the home page of the Dunster family, built in the late 1990s when a family could still be pleased at getting the domain for its own surname, and her ocarinas were one section of it among several. The others were another family member’s wheel-thrown pottery, a page of digital art, a Yosemite page, a sports poll, a guest book and an Ugly Cat Contest.
That distinction governs everything below: the museum holds a copy of the whole site, and most of the whole site is a family’s business rather than a museum’s.
Her own section, ocarinas.htm, carries its own date stamp of October 28, 1998. It describes her materials, her two series, the way she tuned, and her prices, and it survives whole. Every photograph on the site is credited to another member of the family, who holds their copyright.
The site also linked outward, to a pottery page the same two potters kept on GeoCities. That page survives in the Archive too, and the museum holds it.
What the museum holds
309 files, 3.0 MB.
| 60 | pages |
| 65 | photographs and illustrations |
| 180 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026, together with thirteen of the twenty-four images from the GeoCities pottery page it linked to.
The Archive’s captures of dunster.com run from December 1998 to March 2026.
What the museum has not preserved, and why
The later site. The copy is of the site’s earliest form. The crawler took the first capture of each distinct address, so what the museum holds is essentially the 1998–99 site; any redesign between then and the Archive’s last capture in March 2026 is not held. That was true of every mirror the museum made this way. A version-aware second pass began on September 16, 2026, and this site is in the queue.
What the museum holds back, and why
The family’s own material. The mirror contains pages about people who never asked to be in a museum, a guest book, private correspondence addresses and family photographs. None of it is published, and none of it will be.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing from the site is published.
Karen Dunster is living and has not yet been asked. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second. The photographs on the site are the work of another member of the family, who would have to be asked separately.
If this is your work, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.