That sounds really interesting, Mathilde. Being an artist as well, I can
appreciate what you are saying about colours. Unfortunately, there is no
room for displaying shells in my house.

I have a rather boring scientific collection. My main interest is small
shells. I put these in small plastic bags, with labels, and the small
plastic bags go into a larger plastic bag, which is just big enough to hold
a small stock card. On it, I write the name of the species, where it comes
from, and a literature reference. I file these bags as if they were stock
cards, in drawers with partitions big enough to hold the bags. All shells
are in systematical order. Thus, I need no computerised database, and I can
always find a particular shell (in theory at least) in my collection of
about 10,000 lots (no idea how many specimens).

I have another collection. This is a collection of slides of shells.

One part are slides of my specimens, fellow collector's specimens that I am
too stingy to buy, and the Australian Museum's specimens of species one can
never hope to acquire (or I just haven't yet). I use these slides for
talks, drawings, and articles. I have them scanned professionally by Kodak,
but hope to buy a slide scanner soon. Slides are far superior to prints by
the way.

The other part of my slide collection is of live shells. I take these
myself (have a story about this, but will write this in a separate message)

Patty
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