Colophon

How this guide is made, how it checks its facts, and everything it leans on to do that — in one place, generated straight from the data rather than hand-maintained.

How this guide is made

Every fact in this guide — an address, a phone number, a set of hours, whether a place is 21+ — carries a source and the date a human last checked it. We call that a place's provenance, and it's attached to the fact itself, not just the page: you'll find a “Sources” note at the bottom of every place's page.

Facts fall into one of three states, and we say so plainly rather than guessing:

  • Verified— someone read it on the business's own site, called and asked, or checked it in person, recently.
  • Unverified— it comes from a directory listing or hasn't been re-checked yet. We'd rather tell you than fake confidence.
  • Conflicting— two credible sources disagree (the boardwalk's first planks: 1900 or 1902?). When that happens we show you both sides instead of picking one silently.

Facts get re-checked on a schedule, not left to rot: a full sweep runs twice a year, timed to Ocean City's actual season rather than the calendar — a couple of weeks before Memorial Day (catching seasonal reopenings, new businesses, and anything that matters for peak season) and a couple of weeks after the beach season ends in the fall (catching closures and the shift to off-season hours). Anything that goes stale or gets flagged sooner than that gets fixed whenever it's found, not left to wait for the “right” sweep.

The editorial voice — the local-friend “what to actually order” kind of writing — is kept separate from the facts on purpose. Facts get checked against a source; voice is just us talking. Neither one pretends to be the other.

Bibliography

Generated at build time from every source cited anywhere in the dataset — 1635 citations across 183domains. Cite a new source in any place's record and it appears here automatically; nothing below is hand-maintained.

Town & government(8 domains, 30 citations)

Town of Ocean City, state, and federal sources — the most authoritative tier we cite.

Museums & heritage organizations(7 domains, 22 citations)

Museums, historical societies, and heritage nonprofits that hold the primary history.

Encyclopedias & reference sites(4 domains, 47 citations)

General reference sites, used for background and cross-checking, never as the sole source.

Directories & aggregators(6 domains, 23 citations)

Third-party listing sites — corroboration only, never the sole confirmation for a fact.

Business & venue sites(155 domains, 1397 citations)

A place's own website — the default source for its own hours, address, and phone.

Local lore & editorial research(3 domains, 116 citations)

Community history writing, oral tradition, and this project's own research notes — always labeled as lore, not documented fact.

Credits

Beyond the bibliography above, particular thanks to the institutions and researchers whose work this guide leans on most heavily:

  • The OC Life-Saving Station Museum, for keeping and sharing Ocean City's founding-era history.
  • The Travel Hag(Mindie Burgoyne), for documenting the Henry Hotel's phantom-jazz story and other Ocean City lore.
  • Bunk Mann's Vanishing Ocean City, Maryland, a primary reference for the town's vanished-building history.
  • hmdb.org, the Historical Marker Database, for transcriptions of on-site historical markers.
  • The Town of Ocean City's public resources — oceancitymd.gov — for official facts, ordinances, and program details.

Artwork & assets

Most illustration here — the landmark sprites, the map, the badges — is drawn for this guide. Where we use someone else's art, it's credited below, with its licence.

  • Fox mascot (interim art) — “Cartoon Fox Poses” from Openclipart, released into the public domain under CC0 1.0. A placeholder while the guide's own fox is drawn — no attribution is required for it, but credit where credit's due.
  • Fox pixel sprite— “Fox (Wolf Pack Rework)” by patvanmackelberg, bleutailfly, and Jordan Irwin (AntumDeluge), from OpenGameArt, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0/4.0. Used unmodified; any modified version of the sprite itself would be released under the same licence.

Built with

OCMD Explorer is a Next.js (App Router) site, with maps rendered by MapLibre GL JS. It's hosted on Vercel at ocmd.theperfectship.com. The content pipeline — data entry, verification, and this page's own bibliography — is built with Claude models (Anthropic), assigned by task: bulk data transforms to smaller/faster models, standard feature work to a mid-size model, and product decisions to larger models, per the project's own task log.

Independence & corrections

OCMD Explorer is an independent, unaffiliated visitors' guide. It is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by the Town of Ocean City, Maryland, any business listed here, or any of the museums and organizations credited above. Where we cite an official source, that's a citation, not a partnership.

Businesses close, change hands, and change hours more often than any guide can catch in real time — verify anything time-sensitive (hours, age policy, whether a place is even still open) directly with the business before you go.

Found something wrong, out of date, or that shouldn't be here — including a photo or lore entry someone wants taken down? Tell us: corrections@ocmd.theperfectship.com.

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