ANNUAL REPORT 2006
Approved of by the board of our foundation in their meeting of March 17 th, 2007.
PREFACE
For our foundation 2006 was a very quiet year. Both our director and our secretary were very busy with other projects. One collecting trip was made to France. We have enlarged the size of the pictures on our website because nowadays nearly everybody has a large screen with his PC. Also we started a project to upgrade our site from about 1200 pictures to ultimately about 5000. We purchased a modern digital camera to make it possible to take pictures of small shells from 5 mm upwards.
Our secretary married this year and is now living in the town of Woerden. As he specialises in eocene Mollusca from the Paris Basin, part of our collection is now with him in Woerden.
Very sadly this year some of our most kind and helpful friends in New Zealand passed away: Hunter Seelye and Norman Gardner. Both helped us very much with our collection of recent shells. We will remember them gratefully.
Our educational leaflet is available in Dutch, English and French.
As in previous years the foundation is included in the city guide of Utrecht and in the so
called "Kidsgids".
HOUSING
The foundation is housed in Utrecht in the premises at the Kievitdwarsstraat 15.
The following accommodation is available here:
- a modest laboratory to clean and preserve fossil shells (12,5 mē)
- two rooms for displaying fossil shells (44,8 mē and 7 mē)
- a basement for displaying miscellaneous fossils (43 mē)
- a cellar for storage of surplus shells (6,7 mē)
- a room for displaying recent shells (29,4 mē)
- a small room for storage of materials (4,5 mē)
All in all we now have 148 mē floor space.
COLLECTIONS
The "Shell of the Year" is a volute (size 43 mm) found by Dr. R.Hessel in the Eocene
of the Paris Basin. We are not yet sure about its identification; it could be either a juvenile Cymbiola rigaultiana or a Plejona species unknown to us.
On December 31st 2006, there were 53.457 records in our database containing 343.605 specimen.
Compared with 2005 a small growth of only 57 records and 111 specimen. The number of
sites from wich we collected fossil shells rose from 470 to 471.
The effective display area in our 78 showcases amounts to 94 mē,
The storage capacity of our drawers is 336 mē in 3470 drawers.
EQUIPMENT, FURNITURE AND MATERIALS
A Canon digital camera is added to our equipment.
LIBRARY
A small library for naming shells and educational purposes is
available. We can't lend books to the public but give assistance
whenever possible. Our library now contains 1.069 titles (growth 65).
CONTACT
Our foundation can be reached at the following E-mail address:
fossil.shell.museum@xs4all.nl
Our homepage :
http://www.fossilshells.nl/
We now also have an option for the sitename internationalshellmuseum.nl
PLANS FOR 2007
We hope to make a collecting trip to France again. We also plan to work on upgrading our website.
