The University of Guelph Herbarium was founded by the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) as an offshoot of a natural history museum founded in the 1870s. OAC managed the collection from 1870-1971 with the accession of 45,000 specimens. In 1971 the College of Biological sciences (CBS) was established and took over the responsibility of running the herbarium from 1971-2003 with the accession of an additional 15,000 specimens. In 2003, joint collections were named the “University of Guelph Herbarium” placed within the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO), a University initiative joining the strengths of the OAC and the CBS. The collaborative flavour of this plan is reflective of the inter-collegiate history of the herbarium. Since then the University of Guelph Herbarium collection has expanded to included vouchers for DNA barcoding called the BIO collection (10,000 specimens; 2003-2009) and ethnobotanical vouchers called the Aboriginal Repository of Knowledge (ARK) collection (20,000 specimens; 2003-2009). The total University of Guelph Herbarium collection currently houses 90,000 specimens (OAC 45,000; BIO-CBS 25,000; ARK 20,000).
Dr Steven G. Newmaster is the current Director (2003-present) of collections and Chief Curator. Carole Ann Lacroix is the curator responsible for collection general administration; Dr Aron Fazekas is curator for the BIO collections (DNA barcoding vouchers); Dr Subramanyam Ragupathy is curator of ARK collections and database manager for the Herbarium Information Management System (HIMS).