A big thank-you to Tom Watters, Jose Leal, and Kurt Auffenberg for your
quick responses. I should explain that the tilting of this cabinet probably
occurred about two decades ago, before I arrived at the Survey.
 
Twelve cabinets were slightly tilted a few years ago while moved under the
direct supervision of a certain former State Geologist. I wasn't in charge
then, and all I could do was wring my hands, practically in tears and
unable to do anything about it. He begrudged the time it would have taken
to transport the cabinets drawer by drawer, and now I have to deal with the
results over an extended period. Fortunately, the contents of these
cabinets were almost entirely in plastic bags, so the jostling ruined one
thesis collection and little else. Tom, if you want to call my former boss
a lunatic, even indirectly, I sure won't stand in your way.
 
Kurt, I'd go further than your statement: No researcher in his right mind
uses a museum collection when he can collect his own specimens. There is no
better way to ensure that the specimens were collected and processed to the
researcher's satisfaction. I work in a collection that is more than 150
years old, and problems such as these occur all too often with the older
material:
 
1. The specimen was used for a display and the labels lost. Maybe the label
will turn up somewhere else in the collection. It's happened before.
2. The specimen is beautiful, but was acquired from someone who didn't
supply adequate locality information. Or gave a misleading locality.
3. Specimens from different localities are mixed in one tray.
4. The specimen doesn't match the label.
5. The specimen has two labels that disagree.
6. In some really dreadful cases, the specimen derives from a large amateur
collection that was housed on the ground under the floorboards of a house
in an area that receives more than 60 inches of rain per year. Some of them
had to be retrieved with a shovel (hey Kurt, remember the Schowalter
collection?). The 19th-century curator wrote some interesting notes about
these boxes.
7. The old label deteriorated and was copied incompetently.
8. The old label is illegible. Is that letter N for "North", or W for
"West"?
9. The catalog card says there are 11 specimens in the lot, and the lot now
has 3. Or 12.
10. The old, printed label gives the address of the collector, which was
later misinterpreted as the collecting locality. (Kurt, are you still
listening? All those Schowalter shells couldn't have come from Uniontown!)
 
That's the downside. The upside is the pleasure, and practicality, of
working with the same material that my predecessors handled and based their
knowledge of species on. Some were used as the basis for illustrations, or
even as types of new species. And it is the exception, not the rule, to
have problems with older material. Usually, the old catalog card (if there
is one) matches the old material precisely. And the cataloged specimens can
almost invariably be found, which I gather is rather unusual in old
collections.
 
So Jose's point is an apt one: However you organize your shells, always
bear in mind what would happen if you (or someone else) dropped a drawer.
If you live long enough, it will happen! Some museums enclose the specimens
in paper boxes and label the boxes. Of course, you can't see what is
inside. The Geological Survey of Alabama encloses type specimens in clear
plastic boxes, with the labels inside. The boxes are too expensive to use
for all specimens, but they are good for storing large numbers of small
specimens, which can't be labeled individually anyway.
 
One problem with labeling individual shells is that most of them are very
small. This means that the specimen has to be placed in a labeled container
(gel capsule, glass vial, pill box, chipboard tray, etc.). Another problem
is that the label may obscure a feature that a future researcher will want
to examine. Some curators glue on paper labels that can be removed with
water.
 
I think that I will examine the drawers very carefully to see what can be
salvaged. If a specimen is where the labels say it should be, and it could
not be mistaken for anything else, then it is salvageable. If a specimen
has jumped to tray B, but could only have come from tray A, then I will put
it in a new tray C with a note that I removed it from tray B and it
probably came from tray A. If a specimen cannot be traced unambiguously to
its source, then it will go into a box along with other loose specimens to
give to teachers. But it's going to be a headache.
 
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama