There are over 600 herbaria and 90 million herbarium specimens in the US. The herbaria are owned by a variety of institutions and range in size from less than a thousand to a few million specimens. The US Virtual Herbarium (USVH) project’s goal is to enable integrated web access to information from all specimens in all the country’s herbaria. This will provide much better information about the distribution of plants, fungi, and algae, particularly within the US, facilitate research, enable more efficient collection management, and help identify the gaps in our knowledge. Equally importantly, the USVH project will 1) engage and educate a wide range of individuals about the standards that have to be met if collection data are to be maximally informative, 2) increase the exposure of the herbaria, 3) encourage greater use of collections information, and 4) stimulate development of resources for those wanting to (or obliged to) learn more about plants. Many herbaria have already made substantial progress in digitizing (databasing + imaging + georeferencing) and publishing their collection information; others have yet to start. There are an ever increasing number of nodes, both regional and thematic, which integrate and serve information from several herbaria but there are large areas of the country for which there is no effective regional network and many herbaria that are not part of a regional or thematic node.   The USVH project focuses on promoting the communications and collaborations that accelerate the digitization of herbaria and their integration into a national resource. We shall present an overview of the current status of herbarium digitization in the US together with comments on the major impediments that herbaria face in digitizing their collections and actions the project is taking to address them.