Cincinnati Museum Center cares for over six million historic objects, scientific specimens, photographs, moving images, documents and more. These treasures are cataloged into multiple collections, including archaeology, invertebrate and vertebrate fossils, zoology, history artifacts, fine arts and more. The facility includes laboratories for working on paleontology, archaeology and zoology collections, curatorial and registration offices and the Science Library.

You can review our collections policy here.

Hours

Open by appointment only. Click here to contact us.

Loan procedures

Loan requests will be considered for educational and research purposes from educational, non-profit organizations. Loans are not made to individuals or for commercial purposes. Loans for graduate student research must be made to a staff member or professor of the academic institution.

Loan requests for exhibitions

The borrower should contact the CMC registrar or curator of the collection to initiate an exhibition loan request. Allow at least two months from the time the request is submitted until approval. Please submit the following:

 

Letter of request on institutional letterhead is required to initiate the loan process. The letter must include the following:

 

  1. Information about the proposed exhibition
  2. Location where the exhibition will occur
  3. Loan dates and exhibition dates
  4. Exhibition title
  5. List of objects or specimens requested, including the CMC catalog number. The appropriate CMC curator will provide this information.

AAM General or Standard Facility Report must be submitted with the letter of request.

Loan requests for research

Borrower must contact the curator of the collection to initiate a research loan request.

 

Loans for destructive analysis procedures will be considered.

 

Borrower must be in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations regarding specimens to be borrowed.

 

Click here for information on loan requests.

 

Click here for loan requests for Genomic Resources Collections.