The purpose of this digital resource is to facilitate research using the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium (LFCC).
LFCC contains 12,857 herbarium specimens and 16 notebooks containing 4053 pages of notes about the collection and accessioning of its specimens. LFCC was founded in 1974 by Professor Robert Simpson at the Middletown campus of Lord Fairfax Community College in Frederick County, Virginia. The collection grew rapidly during the Atlas of the Virginia Flora collection campaigns of the the 1970's and 1980's and focuses on the vascular flora of the Commonwealth's northern Ridge and Valley physiographic province. Its hand-written notebook pages extend the scientific and historic value of the collection because they frequently have more detailed locality and habitat descriptions than reported by the labels of the herbarium specimens themselves. In 2019, LFCC was transferred to the herbarium of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia following the retirement of Professor Simpson. For further reading about LFCC, see Weeks, A. (2020) A new life for Lord Fairfax Community College herbarium (LFCC). The Vasculum 15 (2): 8 – 12. Lord Fairfax Community College was renamed Laurel Ridge Community College in 2021.
This digital resource contains images of the collection and accession notebook pages that are indexed to the digitized LFCC herbarium specimens, their label metadata and the URL's of their high-resolution images. Notebooks 1-16 may be viewed in their entirety in the "Browse notebooks" tab. Indexed notebook pages, per herbarium specimen, may be browsed in the "Browse specimens" tab as well as queried using the "Search" tab. Images and other metadata from the herbarium specimens derive from the SERNEC Symbiota database for LFCC.
In total, the LFCC notebooks record 12,090 LFCC accession numbers and 1,216 personal collection numbers, all of which reference physical herbarium speciments created for and/or deposited at LFCC. Of these 13,306 events, 10,609 (86%) are matched definitively to one or more (duplicate) herbarium specimen within Omeka S. The extant LFCC herbarium contains 12,857 specimens of which 11,026 herbarium specimens (86%) are referenced by the 10,609 notebook entries. The referenced herbarium specimens outnumber the matching entries due to the presence of a large number of duplicate herbarium specimens in the collection. The Symbiota database records of these 11,026 specimens include the ARK of its Omeka S page. The remaining 14% of the extant LFCC herbarium specimens either lack sufficient label information to provide a definitive connection to a notebook entry or were never logged into the notebooks. Conservatively estimated, 449 LFCC herbarium specimens referenced by the notebooks cannot be accounted for; it is possible some or all of these were lost or destroyed prior to the salvage of the herbarium collection in 2019. We are aware that at least one page from the notebooks is missing (i.e., Notebook 5, page(s )containing LFCC Accession numbers 11-14) and that several other herbarium specimens with LFCC accession numbers lack corresponding entries in the notebooks, so there remains the possibility that other notebook records were lost as well.