It's been nearly a year since I officially started working at the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah state University. The job has been very beneficail for me. I've learned more from this experience then I have in my entire college career. Many people wonder what an herbarium is. In fact we get quite a few people that come in through our doors expecting to find an exhibit of live plants or something else of that sort and find to thier dismay that the herbarium consists of nothing more than rows of metal cabinents. Not very exciting as compared to maybe a greenhouse but stored within the metal cabinents is the next best thing. And the things contained in the cabinents is a collection of preserved plant specimens. And in that sentence is your simple definition of what a herbarium is.
You may have even started your own herbarium and not even have know it. Have you ever pick flowers and put them in a book to be pressed flat? Well this process is a vital part of the herbarium. The specimens are pressed flat and dried in a a plant press (in your case a book) and then later mounted on paper which is a standard size. Probably one of the things you failed to include with these specimens is a label containing information of where you got it from, who collected it, the date it was collected, and other information on habitat, associated species, lat and long, or other information. This label is a vital part because it tells the viewer all the information they need to know about that particular plant at the particular time it was collected (this is not always true because some labels have more imformation than others).
Herbariums have many purposes. These purposes are:
--- if you were to set up a collection of living plant species ( just one of each) for just the Intermountain Region (Utah, Nevada, and parts of Idaho and Wyoming) and place them in a greenhouse you would soon run out of room. You would probably fill it up just by collecting trees. Herbariums alleviate this problem because the specimens are dead so you don't have upkeep on trying to keep the specimens alive (because sometimes plants just die) and you don't have as much of a problem with space because the plants don't keep growing and you can mount a specimen so it contains all the vital parts of a plant but still fit on a piece of paper.
---one important part of scientific research is the fact that is you or others can't reproduce your results for a particular claim then your claim isn't valid. Say you do research and find out that this plant is related to another plant which previously it wasn't even considered to be related and you want to publish a paper. Herbarium specimens can help with others being able to reproduce your results because they have the same plants that you work with in your study(you have to have preserved the specimens that you work with).
---What about winter? A scientist that works with plants has a year-long job. He can't just stop when winter comes and all the plants go dormant.
---What about extinct plants? Herbariums have these plants on file to be looked at and studied. They contain a rich heritage of material and information.

Well, I think I have bored you enough with what an herbarium is. I think I will talk to you now about what I am doing at work. When I started this job I mainly did three simple tasks.
1- mounting of specimens (arts and crafts time as I like to call it)
2- Data entry in the database
3- filing of the specimens
These three tasks have evolved into numerous tasks since Mary got back from her trip to Australia in last March. At this time she recruited me as a research aid. It has been an enjoyable yet overwhelming experience at times. I have had to learn basically a whole new language of plant terms in order to understand what I was suppose to do. I now work not only in the herbarium but also at the USDA Forage and Range Research Lab on campus as well. At this lab I am working with the Australasian Stipeae and other grasses that Mary collected on her trip in Australia. What we are doing is trying to establish a phylogeny or plant ancestry for the Australasian Stipeae. This part of the job is where I have learned the most and has also been the most challenging. I just run extraction for the specimens and then run the PCR or polymerase chain reactions for samples we have. I am currently working on finding the right primer pairs for my given samples using primers found to work in Romaschenko's paper (link is here http://www.brit.org/fileadmin/Publications/JBotResInstTexas_2_1/14_Romaschenko_at_al-Phylogeny_of_American_Stipeae.pdf). I have had a few challenges with a couple of things but everything seems to be coming together. I have to opportunity of getting my information published in this next year four times and if all goes well I may be going to Japan this next summer to present my results.