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In preparation for the move of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium (MT) to its final location at the Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre, an inventory was made. Over the course of 2 months, 36 volunteers counted all 620,000+ vascular plant specimens in the herbarium, adding up to 800 man hours. Specimens were counted and pencilled per case, tray and folder. A folder contains specimens from the same genus and continent (or country for the United States and Canada). An additional 300 man hours went into transferring the inventory to a spreadsheet, checking it for inconsistencies and assigning each genus to a family following the classification that will be used to organize the herbarium at its new location. This inventory helps us to organize the move, but also provided us with detailed, quantitative metadata and new insights about the collection. We discovered the collection contains 30% less specimens, but a higher taxonomic and North-American coverage than previously estimated. As this metadata might also be useful for external users, we published it as a Darwin Core Archive at http://bit.ly/mt-inventory and as a Google Fusion Table at http://bit.ly/mt-inventory-gft. The inventory could also be used to better estimate the cost and duration of collecting quantitative metadata for the discovery of collections, or at least herbaria, worldwide.