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- Typos - People make mistakes. They miss-interpret abbreviations. They conflate formation with locations.
- Duplication - For some localities there are multiple cards, some with additional data, some with original data crossed out or edited. I have found as many as four cards for a single location.
- County numbering errors - At one point the numbering scheme changed. You will find cards with the original number crossed out and one that differs by one added in. Some of these older numbers made it into the database and thus the county is wrong. Sometimes this is apparent in the database itself - e.g. when a coastal county shows a Paleozoic fossil or formation. These can be gnarly to unravel and I usually try to confirm with someone else if I'm making a change like this. And, I Iit is critical to record in the remarks the old entry and a rationale.
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- NPL - Current NPL numbering scheme.
- NPL-lastname - I have seen these, but I think they only occur in Alt Numbers. E.g. NPL-McCall, NPL-Garvie, NPL-Elliott, ...
- BEG - Bureau of Economic Geology Collection
- P - Plummer Collection.
- UT - Originally collected by members of the UT Dept. of Geological Sciences. Inclues the Changegrain Eocene collection.
- WSA - W. S. Adkins collection.
- K - R. H. King Collection. .
- OMB - O. M. Ball collection, mostly Eocene plant material
- R - Rio Bravo Collection. From the Rio Bravo Oil Company.
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When we get donations from collectors, they normally have some scheme. As these are catalogued they are given NPL numbers, with the collector's original number in the Alternate Numbers field.
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