Help! What to do with my shells?

[paul monfils]

Memory may work well for the names of a couple of hundred shells, but the real value of a collection lies in the data about each shell - the locality where it was collected, habitat notes, etc.  Even that might be committed to memory for a collection of 100 shells, but collections have a way of fairly quickly becoming 500 ... 1,000 ... 5,000 specimens, and if you don't have a good written record, your collection is going to be effectively decreasing in value as it increases in size.