Help! What to do with my shells?

[cwalton]

When I was little, I was absolutely obsessed with shells and collected quite a few interesting ones.  The thing is that I, being little and wanting to do everything my own way, threw away hundreds of original collectors cards and rewrote most of them with my own with generic names from a book. I'd like to make my collection worthwhile without having wasted all that time, effort, and money for nothing. What should I do?

[paul monfils]

The correct names of the shells should not be too hard to establish. You could get most of them by posting a few group photos here. However, what really makes a collection valuable is the locality data and habitat descrïptions.  If you have discarded those there is no way to recover them.

[cwalton]

Yeah, I do have the correct names, I just didn't know if I should just scrap what I have and start over or not. Thanks though!

[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.