I was looking around in the Smithsonian Institution's on-line catalog of bird specimens the other day, and found an intriguing record that appears to have been overlooked by Ohio researchers---a specimen of a gyrfalcon from 1971 in Circleville, Ohio. This is only the fifth known specimen of an Ohio gyrfalcon, and to my way of thinking it's far more significant than a hundred eBird lists from mobs of listers reporting far more pedestrian species at stake-out sites. Most of the large bird collections have computerized their holdings and make them available on line. There are various services to access these data; one example is ORNIS, which offers searchable lists for over 70 North American institutions, including the major national repositories. You can search by species, or locale, or year. eBird too could offer a national database of this information, but I suspect they are far more interested in recruitment and vetting contemporary field reports, evanescent as they may be. Ohio hosts some significant collections, many of which have recently catalogued all their holdings electronically, but as far as I know only one of them makes these data available to the public: the non-participating institutions include our three largest and most prestigious: the Ohio State University, the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. And there are more. The only significant Ohio museum which freely shares data from its holdings, to the best of my knowledge, is the Dayton (Boonshoft) Museum, with ~5000 specimens. At the larger museums, inquisitive Ohioans can ask for and usually receive details on a given species or specimen, but their complete new databases are not open for research by the public. A lot of my friends and acquaintances have volunteered many months for the drudgery of entering these data for the museums involved, and I wonder how they feel when the public cannot consult their work. This may not bother many readers of this message, but we all use compilations of data like these in learning about our bird life, and you should be concerned when it's not available to the public. Your life list may seem precious, but far more important are accurate and complete lists for your city, your county, and your state, which are valued by everyone. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ 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]