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Conchylinet v.2.9 - 2014-04-16
3202018 visits since Jan. 2007.
| The Collection |
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I started collecting and recording last century in the early nineties. Most of the shells are self-collected and have been found dead along the shores. Little by little the collection grows. Thanks to friends and family, I could get specimens from various location to enlarge the specie range. I do not buy shells and I do not keep shells from unknown locations or with poor data. That's why all of the shells recorded have accurate data, besides most of them are common and are easily findable by everybody. |
| The database |
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All shells are recorded by set in a "mother" database. A set consist in a number of specimens of the same specie collected in the same site and at the same time. A maximum of data is recorded for each set (size, quality, condition, etc.).
The Conchylinet database is a partial extraction of the mother database. Selected data have been uploaded in a MySQL database engine. The data is stored in different tables each of them having different columns (or fields). One column contains one kind of information (e.g. the column size contains the size in millimeters of the shell). At this time the species fields are : genus, specie, family, class, malacological province and maximum size. I will provide access to extra data fields when the number of records of the database will make it relevant (e.g.: I will add Country data when each species would have records from enough countries). A database helps greatly in storing and organising data. But the most interesting feature of databases is the ability to perform specific SQL queries to retrieve parts of information. |
| How to browse the collection |
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Three tools have been developed to browse the collection: The specie listings For slow connection, it display the full list of the species contained in the database. 3 specific lists exist: one for Gastropods, one for bivalves and one for the other classes. Clicking on a specie name will open a popup with details on the specie. You can open several popups at the same time. The specie interactive plates For fast connection, it display plates of specie thumbnails sorted by Family. Again, clicking on a specie thumbnail will open its detail popup. You browse the plates by clicking on their number. You can also query the collection and get customized plates as a result. I developed this tool because I could not find it anywhere on Internet, it should be very useful to quickly identify your shells. It is very simple to use: select the parameters you want to retrieve and click Submit. The procedure just filters the database and returns the specie thumbnails that match the parameters you selected. The Search engine It is a simple text box where you can type up to 4 text strings. If matching strings are found in the database (within species or families names), the corresponding species will be displayed in a list as a result. |
| The pictures |
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You should have noticed that the picture are of various quality. All of them are digital but have been taken from various technology. The first picture have been made in 1995-96 using an analogic video camera directly plugged on a video card of a PC, these pictures are low resolution snapshots of the image brought on the computer. The last pictures come from digital cameras using macro mode under artificial or natural light with a paper background (often blue coloured). When I have enough time I change the background using a picture editor software to turn it into a homogenous colour (black, blue, green...) according to the shell dominant colour. |