It was formerly known simply as the Millersville University Herbarium until its dedication in 2004 in honor of its late curator, James C. Parks.
[2] The collection can be searched and records with images downloaded or mapped at the Herbarium's website.
Most of these specimens are of vascular plants collected from the lower Susquehanna River valley.
Specimens in the collection date back to the 1830s, with collection density increasingly substantially in the late 1850s to mid 1860s, which coincides roughly with the university's founding as Millersville State Normal School in 1855.
The herbarium launched NatureAtlas in 2008 to serve as its specimen repository database,[3] which was expanded shortly thereafter to be a generally accessible Web platform for mapping and exploring geospatially explicit observations and images of flora and fauna.