I try to arrange by family and genus in drawers. (I don't have enough to put in
more order than that yet). I put them in small boxes or watchmakers cases with
cotton wool, but some shells that are more attractive get special treatment in
a glass covered display case that has tiered shelves.  They are just organized
aesthetically with their tags neatly posted in front.  And then there are
shells that are too big for the drawers.  I will eventually build some larger
drawers to hold these in family order.  Then there are the microshells.  These
are mainly stored inside coin-holders which fit neatly into pocket pages meant
for slides (I mean photographic slides).  These can go into binders.

Collections that have many examples of a shell or a fossil - perhaps more than
one "collection" can be maintained - one stratigraphic (subgrouped by
paleoassemblage), and one taxonomic.  It might take work, but in cases where
there is only one specimen - it could be photographed,the photo glued to a wood
block and placed in the collection that needed it with a cross-reference ID to
where the real specimen was located.  This shouldn't take up much more space
than is already dedicated, since most of the specimens are already in the
collection. Sounds like a job for summer students!

Nora Bryan
Calgary, Alberta
CANADA

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> Dear Conchlers,
>
> This is a topic that we covered a long time ago, but with so many new
> members, I'd like to broach it again to see if any new insights come up.
> How do you arrange the shells in your collection? For example: By genus and
> family, by location, by date of collection, by collector, by size? (For
> fossils, they can also be arranged by geologic age or formation.) Do you
> maintain shells in only one arrangement, or in more than one? Why?
>
> Here at the heart of genteel Deep South civilization, the type specimens
> are kept together, but the general arrangement is stratigraphic. That is,
> fossils are arranged chiefly according to what geologic stratum (layer)
> they came from, and only secondarily by taxon. Within a cabinet devoted,
> say, to the Cretaceous Demopolis Chalk, there might be several drawers of
> oysters, a few drawers of other bivalves, a drawer of gastropods,
> nautiloids, and ammonites, and a drawer or two of non-molluscan fossils
> such as polychaetes, brachiopods, wood, and so on. Since the fossils' main
> use over time has been to document the geologic mapping of the state, it
> makes sense to keep them together. Still, it does hamper the work of
> taxonomists who want to see every specimen belonging to a certain family.
> This can necessitate a veritable odyssey through file cards and cabinets,
> with tables having to be moved aside to access some of the cabinets in the
> cramped basement room. I usually do the bulk of that for the researcher the
> day before the visit, but it's always an adventure and you never know what
> will turn up.
>
> As a paleoecologist, I experimented with arranging the fossils of one
> formation according to the locality where they were collected, so you can
> see the animals that lived together at a glance. This is ecologically
> insightful, but it makes it very hard to find specimens of any one species,
> so I can't recommend it for most collectors.
>
> Andrew K. Rindsberg
> Geological Survey of Alabama
>
> P.S. Thanks for the messages on poison ivy and bug spray. I don't use bug
> sprays myself; DEET makes me sneeze and sneeze until I wash it off. So I
> just bring along a sweet person who attracts most of the bugs instead.