Herbarium Featured in the University Record
The Herbarium is featured in the University of Michigan staff and faculity newspaper University Record November 2010 in an article written by Kevin Brown. In an excerpt from the article the author writes:
Mounted on acid-free paper, and filed away in the climate-controlled storage area of the University Herbarium, are plants dating back to the 1820s and ’30s.
And while staff members are busy imaging roughly 20,000 key specimens at high resolution — just a fraction of those held at the Herbarium — the actual specimens, mounted on paper for ease of handling, will for the foreseeable future continue to be essential for research. “You can’t extract DNA from an image,” says Tony Reznicek, assistant director, curator and research scientist at the Herbarium.
Ranked as the third-largest university herbarium in North America, behind Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley, the U-M Herbarium holds about 1.7 million specimens. They mostly are mounted on 11-by-16-inch sheets of paper collected in folders color coded to denote four world regions. Among the Herbarium’s holdings are 96,000 algae specimens, 280,000 fungi and 57,000 lichens, besides the more typical land plants.