Partnering with Archivists to Process the Manuscript Collection Present at the Marshall University Herbarium

Abstract

The Marshall University Herbarium (MUHW) is located on the third floor of the Science Building at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, United States. It was founded in the 1930\u27s by Dr. Frank A. Gilbert when Marshall was still Marshall College. Today, MUHW is the second largest herbarium in West Virginia with about 50,000 specimens, including 20 types. Mostly composed of vascular plants, the herbarium also contains small collections of non-vascular plants, fungi, algae, fossils, and some ethnobotanical material, mainly brought from Ecuador by one of the former curators, Dr. Dan Evans between the 1980\u27s and 2000\u27s. Apart from these biological collections, the Herbarium also has a small library and many other documents from former curators: letters from 1920-1930 written by Dr. Gilbert during the early years of MUHW, and research, teaching, and personal documents from Dr. Evans. In order to process the documentation present in the Herbarium, the MUHW curator reached out to the chair of the Special Collections Department at Marshall University, whose focus is precisely on manuscript collections like this and their historical relevance to the University and the Huntington area