Well, once again I hit reply without looking.  Sorry to all on the list.
The response to Mique was meant to be to her and not 300 odd people.  Not
that all 300 of you are odd...but a fair number......oh well.

Now to make this a bit more shell related.  David Kirsh (a fellow Conch-l
member) and I have been talking about a COA web site with images of shells.
We have all kicked this around before and the last time it resulted in Ross
Mayhew cranking up a page to let us dump images and check identifications
thanks Ross and I will get that article to you -- promise).

Well, we think we can have a bit more.  Sort of an electronic compendium.
We want everyone who is able, to be allowed to submit images, species data,
etc.  Toward this end I plan on bringing a CD to Houston that will include a
dummy web page with links that will demonstrate what we are talking about.
Jeff Schroeder has also discussed such a venture but his idea is way beyond
what I am proposing.  Hopefully if we start fairly simple we can always beef
it up as we go and integrate into Jeff's program.  We just need to start
with some data -- a list of shell families, link to the family and you get a
list of species where each species name is linked to an image(s) and
description.  The framework will be standard and anyone wanting to add an
image, locale, data, etc. will pretty much just fill in the blanks and
submit it.  Now the trick, of course, is how to ensure the data is correct,
the shell ID is correct, the locale is ...well you get the drift.  So we
would need a traffic cop and that cop would need some folks he or she could
check with if the answer wasn't in the book.  One of the plus sides is we
can ALWAYS correct an error.  This will be a dynamic compilation of data and
we will be constantly updating, correcting, and improving.  Thus we can keep
working on the shell data and when Jeff designs a more advanced page (better
search engines, dynamic images, animations, range maps, etc.)  we will at
least have plenty of initial data to load.  Plus this will give him some
idea of what is needed.

So, as I said, I will bring a CD with an idea of what this can look like.
Maybe we can play around with it at the Conch-L gathering.  I had kind of
planned on starting up something similar myself but it really belongs with
an organization like COA.

Line up and take your shots.

Thomas Eichhorst
4528 Quartz Dr. N.E.
Rio Rancho, NM 87124-4908
USA