about the registry
anonymousmaterials.com is an informal public catalogue of unattributed material samples. It exists to give a stable, citable identifier to specimens whose provenance is incomplete, disputed, or deliberately withheld, and to make their basic analytical data retrievable by interested third parties.
The catalogue has no institutional backing. It is maintained by a small group of volunteers on a non-commercial basis and operates from donated server capacity. Decisions about what is accessioned, what is retained, and what is withdrawn are made internally; there is no review board.
scope
Submissions are accepted for any solid inorganic material that can be physically retained at one of the registry's intake addresses, or for which the submitter can supply enough analytical detail that an independent verifier could re-acquire the specimen. Organic compounds, biological material, and items judged to be of likely cultural-heritage concern are out of scope and will be returned without indexing.
The registry does not assign value, certify authenticity, or attest to commercial grade. Records are descriptive rather than evaluative. The presence of a record neither implies nor precludes acceptance of the specimen by any other catalogue, market, museum, or scholarly publication. Users who require an appraisal or a chain-of-custody attestation should approach institutions equipped to issue such documents.
governance
Operational decisions are taken by the standing registrar — a single rotating role whose holder is known internally and whose identity is not published. Successions are recorded in a sealed addendum to the printed accession books and disclosed only on the request of the incoming registrar. The registrar is not paid; turnover is described in the registry's bylaws as "frequent enough to matter, infrequent enough to remember".
Two further parties retain standing read-only access to the canonical records: a notary, charged with co-signing the annual integrity export (see methodology), and an archivist, charged with the maintenance of the printed accession books. Neither party is in a position to alter records on their own.
The registry has, on three occasions in its history, declined to act on requests for retroactive amendment originating from parties claiming institutional authority. The reasoning, in each case, has been published in the corresponding annual addendum series and is available in the printed books.
funding
Operating expenses — server capacity, postage, replacement consumables for the in-house Raman bench, occasional travel for instrument access — are met by personal donations from prior contributors and by a small annual subvention from a scientific instrument cooperative whose membership is unrelated to mineralogy. No funds are accepted from commercial dealers, auction houses, or any party that derives revenue from the trade in mineral specimens.
The registry holds no bank account, no legal entity, and no intellectual property. All catalogue text is dedicated to the public domain to the extent permitted by the laws applying at the registry's points of operation. Photographs, where provided, are released under a non-commercial attribution licence; redistribution for sale is not permitted.
position on cultural heritage
The registry will not knowingly index a specimen whose acquisition appears to have circumvented the export controls of any source jurisdiction, regardless of whether the specimen has changed hands since. Submitters are required to declare provenance to the best of their ability. Where provenance is incomplete, that fact is recorded in the public notes; where provenance is suspect, the submission is declined and the specimen returned, where return is practicable. The registry does not, and will not, function as a laundering channel.
Specimens whose return is not practicable are held under seal and notified to the appropriate competent authority of the identified source jurisdiction. The current count of such held specimens is given in the annual addendum series under the heading "items withheld from circulation".
relation to other reference works
The registry maintains a cordial but distant relationship with the larger mineralogical reference works. Where a record can be cross-referenced unambiguously to an entry in a published catalogue (e.g. RRUFF, mindat.org, IMA-CNMNC approved species list), the cross-reference is included in the public notes. Where cross-reference is impossible — by virtue of incomplete analytical data, ambiguous identification, or deliberate withholding of provenance — no such reference is given, and the omission should not be read as a comment on the completeness or accuracy of those works.
The registry does not republish data acquired from any of the above sources. Users requiring authoritative species data should consult those sources directly.
history of the public mirror
The registry has been in continuous operation since 2007-04-22. The current public mirror at anonymousmaterials.com has been operational since 2025-11-23; prior to that, the public face of the registry had been hosted on a sequence of academic and institutional subdomains, the identities of which are no longer maintained at the request of the contributing parties.
The relocation to a self-hosted domain was carried out to consolidate the public index, to remove dependencies on hosts whose continued availability could no longer be relied upon, and to shorten the chain of administrators with access to unredacted submission packets. Internal accession identifiers, analytical data, and proof-hash chain were carried over without modification; the genesis-hash of the indexing integrity chain (see methodology) is bound to the registry's founding date and is therefore unchanged across the relocation.
Reverse-DNS and WHOIS records for anonymousmaterials.com therefore reflect only the date of the most recent move, not the duration of the underlying registry. Researchers wishing to cite older records may continue to use the AM-YYYY-NNNNN identifier without qualification; older URLs of the form …/registry/AM-YYYY-NNNNN[-X] from previous hosts will not resolve and should be replaced with anonymousmaterials.com/sample/AM-YYYY-NNNNN-X.
frequently asked, briefly answered
| why anonymous submitters? | Several of the registry's most useful holdings would not exist if attribution had been a precondition of accession. The cost of accepting unattributed material is borne by readers, who must take the analytical data on its own merits; the alternative cost — a thinner catalogue — was judged the greater of the two. |
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| can I visit the registry? | No public premises are maintained. Specimen viewing is arranged on request and at the discretion of the standing registrar; expect a delay of several months. |
| do you sell, trade, or appraise specimens? | No. The registry has no commercial role and will not facilitate the disposal of accessioned material. |
| why is the integrity chain not published to a public ledger? | The construction described in methodology achieves the same property of tamper-evidence using only the algorithm and the published genesis-hash, without requiring the registry to take a position on the long-term stewardship of any particular external system. Verification can be carried out offline. |
| why is correspondence so slow? | The registry is staffed by volunteers acting in their own time. Backlogs are typical. Material correspondence is processed in the order in which it is received; urgency cannot be expedited. |
| can the press contact you? | The registry does not maintain a press office. Inquiries are routed through the same channel as ordinary correspondence and are not given priority. A standing practice is to refer journalists to the published addenda, which contain substantially everything the registry has chosen to say on its own behalf. |
languages
Submissions and correspondence may be made in English, German, French, Spanish, or Italian. Records are catalogued and republished in English; any submitted text in another language is paraphrased rather than translated literally and annotated as such in the public notes. Material received in languages outside this set is acknowledged but processed at a considerably reduced cadence and may, depending on volume, be held in queue without further action.
contact
Public correspondence: cite the full accession identifier in the subject line, include any prior reference numbers, and send via the form linked from methodology. Expect replies on the order of weeks rather than days.
Postal correspondence is accepted at the registry's nominated intake addresses but is not solicited; outside of arranged specimen returns, electronic correspondence is the strongly preferred channel. The registry will not initiate correspondence with parties who have not first written to it.
this interface
The current public interface (ui-2014.04, patched 2021.11) is in the process of being replaced. A small number of legacy records may render incorrectly in this version; please refer to the printed accession books for the canonical text.