After my post about bird periodicals, I thought to offer information about ornithological holdings in Ohio museums. You can find an old but useful article in the Auk 90(1):160-161, which treats sixteen Museum ornithological holdings in Ohio. It offers brief descriptions of large museum collections of skins, skeletons, mounts, egg sets, and nests. This article is from 1973, and of course the numbers of specimens have increased somewhat since that time. This brief article deals with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, the Dayton Museum of Natural History, the Ohio State Museum, the University of Cincinnati, Miami University Department of Zoology, the Toledo Museum of Health and Natural History, and nine smaller collections in Ohio. Not all of the museums offer displays of bird specimens, but they are willing to assist serious citizens who ask serious questions about items in their collections. Unfortunately, few of them even offer complete lists online of their holdings (the OSU collection is an exception, with complete data on Vertnet), but they will supply information to serious inquiries. It seems likely that the important collections will eventually be inventoried and made available online, although I must say some of these efforts have gone along for quite a while. Museum specimens, beyond public showings, are for serious inquiries. One layer of seriousness is sharing data of specimens for interested folks in Ohio; important collections should be carefully inventoried and made public on the internet, and that in important instances serious members of the public will be allowed to examine specimens and records. I can't imagine museum curators will always be willing to have members of the public to handle their specimens, but they surely must find it useful at last to make their holdings known to the public. ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]