Dear Listers,

I am glad to announce that The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, on Sanibel
Island, Florida, just uploaded a new search engine (go to
www.shellmuseum.org/collection.html and follow instructions) that provides
fast online, read-only access to a current version of its collection
database. Only about 16,000 have been catalogued at this point (an
estimated 10 % of the collection), but we are working fast to make more
records available.

The database consists of 42 fields of information for each lot (record) of
mollusks in the Museum’s collection. Searches may be made by using 13 of
these fields (5 taxonomic, 6 geographic, catalogue number (BMSM No.), or
Source (= donor name). Two kinds of reports (summary, full) are available
for each search. The first (summary) report shows data in 13 basic fields;
20 records per page will be returned. The BMSM No. in this table is a link
to a more complete report (39 fields) on the selected lot.

Searches may be made on single words or parts of words inserted in one or
several fields. Words in two or more fields perform searches using logical
“And”, wherein the combination of words must be
true.

The Shell Museum thanks Dick Willis, Jon Greenlaw, and Tina Petrikas for
their dedication to this project. We are also grateful to the
Sanibel-Captiva Shell Club for sponsoring the Web search engine created by
Calusa Graphics of Sanibel Island, Florida. Check it out!

Best wishes,

José

__________________________________________________________________________
José H. Leal, Ph.D., Director
The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor, The Nautilus
www.shellmuseum.org

3075 Sanibel-Captiva Road
Sanibel, FL 33957 USA
(239)395-2233
fax (239)395-6706