Dear Friends, in my opinion it is better to have as few fields as possible in a database. The lower number of fields you have the easier and faster it is to enter data. At the beginning I had a database with fields like "excoll", "way of cleaning", and some others but with time and practice I decided to delete them: their information was not so precious and the time saved avoiding moving between unuseful fields is consistent when you deal with hundreds of records. When possible, I included its information in another field: for example, "ex coll" info went into legit field, writing "by way of ...". Moreover, I have aggregated information in single fields: country, province, locality, coordinates, height, habitat are in my database in a single field named "locality". In this way printing locality data (which comprises all the above information) is easier. Despite this latter opinion may be questionable due to personal preferences, I strongly believe important to include author in the same field of species- subspecies. I think this is a more correct way of keeping data, since a name is nothing without the author (and date) who described it. I strongly agree with Alfonso Pina's opinion, also because a "very well known and stable Systematics" is a real utopia... However, I built a similar way of organizing the systematics of my collection, giving numbers to classes, orders and families so that they can be sorted. In every family genera and species are listed alfabetically. Regards, Paolo Paolo Giulio ALBANO Bologna, ITALY E-mail: [log in to unmask]