The purpose of this digital resource is to facilitate research using the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium (LFCC).
LFCC contains approximately 20,000 herbarium specimens and 16 notebooks containing over 4000 pages of notes about the collection and accessioning of its specimens. LFCC was founded in 1974 by Professor Robert Simpson at the Middletown (Frederick County) campus of Lord Fairfax Community College and grew most rapidly during the Atlas of the Virginia Flora collection campaigns of the the 1970's and 1980's. Its hand-written notebook pages frequently have more detailed locality and habitat descriptions than reported by the labels of the herbarium specimens and thereby extend the scientific and historic value of the collection. 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.
The digital resource contains images of the notebook pages that are indexed to each herbarium specimen, its label metadata and its high-resolution image. 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.