Dear All,
To those members who commented on this subject:  I took no personal offense
to any of the discussion.  I thank Andy and Doug for their praise (sent
privately) of my work over the last 15 years.  I was faced with a huge task
when the Alabama collection (and Beal-Maltbie, McGinty, Warmke, Lightfoot,
and so on) arrived at my doorstep.  Granted, we had excellent support from
the National Science Foundation, but the amount(s) of material were
intimidating to say the least.  This brings me to my next point and only
comment about the leg: issue.  Curatorial staff and the private sector who
have not faced a similar gigantic task really don't know the problems.  We
had NSF deadlines (it took about 5 years to complete the reorganization and
cataloging of the Alabama collection)so we had to take shortcuts at the
time of actual data entry. I could not train student help to competently
recognize hand-writting of the various luminaries who deposited their
material in Alabama.  And I couldn't do it on my own and that's what I
faced.  Heck, there were something like 11,000 lots of Pleurocerids alone.
Most of them were probably collected by H. H. Smith, but not labeled as
such.  If I would have worried about crossing every T and dotting every I,
I would never have accomplished the task at hand on deadline (which I did)
which was to finally make this extremely valuable material available to the
scientific community.  Over the years much of the cataloged material was
updated, most has not been.  I leave it to future staff members and
borrowers of the material to make these revisions (the original labels were
of course retained with the specimens).  Someone who wants a perfectly
edited and printed label every single time has never worked for very long
in a major research collection in any discipline.  La-La land!  I like
consistancy and sometimes I am consistantly wrong!  At least someone in the
future will know how to handle it.
 
XXXX,    Kurt