Turfgrass Information Center, Michigan State University Libraries

In Memoriam – The TGIF Legacy: Joe Vargas
World renowned turf pathologist Joseph Vargas passed away on April 18, 2024. He dedicated his 50+ year career to improving turf wherever possible, authoring hundreds of articles, and giving over 1,000 presentations. Hailed as a true revolutionary thinker, his loss will be felt throughout the turfgrass industry.

(Photo credit: USGA Green Section Record, May/June 2007)

To see the works by or about Dr. Joe Vargas: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/flink?SRCH=JoeVargas

From the Dr. James R. Watson, Jr. Image Archive: "Three men looking over the newly established Hollywood Hills cemetery in Los Angeles, 1953".
https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m51j9bg2j

The Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) database is open access and contains over 300,000+ records all related to the study of turfgrass science and its management!

Get started at: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif to start researching today!

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Over the years, the Turfgrass Information Center has worked together with content contributors to host full-text resources on the Turfgrass Information File.
This infographic highlights some of the interesting facts about the full-text resources that are currently hosted.

The Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) database is open access and contains over 300,000+ records all related to the study of turfgrass science and its management! The database includes items ranging from refereed and report style materials, to popular and trade publications, and over two-thirds of TGIF records link directly to the full-text of the item.

Get started at: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif to start researching today!

If you had access to TGIF before OA - you are now considered a legacy member and should continue to access TGIF via the route you previously did, whether that be via a university, cooperator, or personal login. While the public has full access to all TGIF metadata and all TGIF search features, certain publishers have elected to keep a small percentage of full-text URLs linked from within the database restricted to legacy members.

We are so pleased that the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) database is now open access - now everyone can access this one-of-a-kind bibliographic dataset! With two-thirds of TGIF's 300,000+ records linking directly to the item itself, the literature becomes more accessible for those who may not be able to regularly visit a research library. We are so proud to bring our work even closer to Michigan State Universities land-grant mission!

If you had access to TGIF before OA - you are now considered a legacy member and should continue to access TGIF via the route you previously did, whether that be via a university, cooperator, or personal login. While the public has full access to all TGIF metadata and all TGIF search features, certain publishers have elected to keep a small percentage of full-text URLs linked from within the database restricted to legacy members.

Visit: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif to start your turfgrass research journey!

This week the Turfgrass Information Center, Michigan State University Libraries is making the Turfgrass Information File database publicly available!

The release of the open access database also coincides with the 40-year anniversary of the partnership between the USGA and the MSU Libraries, with the first record being entered into the TGIF database the following year on Sept. 10, 1984. Today, the database holds over 300,000 records. Explore this cooperative project of the United States Golf Association and the TIC here: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif.

Welcome Neil! We are so happy you're here! 😊

We are so excited to welcome Neil Romanosky on his first day as the new dean of ! Neil joins us from Ohio University, where he previously served as dean of university libraries. We are also grateful to Terri Miller, who has served as MSU Libraries interim dean since July 2022. Thank you for your leadership, Terri, and welcome aboard, Neil!

This summer marked 20 years since The James B Beard Turfgrass Library Collection was dedicated in the Michigan State University Libraries!

In April of 2003, Dr. James B Beard and Mrs. Harriet Beard donated roughly 30,000 items to the Turfgrass Information Center. After several months of cleaning and restoring the materials and having special cabinets built, the Beard Collection came to be and was officially dedicated on July 16th, 2003.

The Michigan State University Libraries began to systematically collect printed turfgrass materials throughout the 1960s under the direction of Dr. Beard and then-Library Director, Dr. Richard Chapin. The personal collection of the late O. J. Noer came to the MSU Libraries in 1968, helping expand this mission. Then in 2003, the addition of the Beard Collection solidified MSU as having the largest and most complete collection of turfgrass literature in the world. The Beard Collection includes international coverage of turfgrass research and management literature, including books, periodicals, and technical reports.

Twenty years on, we take a moment to look back at this momentous occasion that truly helped define our operation.

Left to Right: Dr. Beard and Dr. Paul Rieke speaking at the dedication, and the Beard Collection as it appeared during the dedication in 2003.

Michigan State University Football is back and the turf looks amazing! If you're looking to up the game with your own turf, the Turfgrass Information File database is here to help. Check out all the information TGIF has to offer by visiting: tic.msu.edu

(photo credit: Nick DeVolder)

Just a this Thursday! Currently awaiting TGIF database processing are these two extension bulletins: "Your Lawn and Its Care" by Henry Indyk and Ralph Engel from Rutgers University in 1966, and "Your Lawn" by C. J. Willard, Victor H. Ries, and Richard R. Davis from The Ohio State University in 1957.

A feature of the database that deserves more attention is the integration of Dr. James B Beard’s Turfgrass Encyclopedia for Golf Courses, Grounds, Lawns, Sports Fields.

Full entries for all terms are accessible through Basic Search in TGIF. If you search for a term that is related to turfgrass or its management and a correlating term exists within the encyclopedia, you will receive it at the top of your search results.

Clicking the hotlinked word in the "title" field will open the entry and you can read the full text as it appears within the encyclopedia. In this example, we’ve searched for “thatch” and received two results. Give it a try yourself the next time you are looking to define a turf related term!

“Girls Standing on Lawns” by Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler

According to The Museum of Modern Art, this book is “poetic and thought-provoking, ‘Girls Standing on Lawns’ is a meditation on memories, childhood, nostalgia, home, family, and the act of seeing. The gorgeous visual material sets the stage for what Handler succinctly describes as "a photograph, a painting, a sentence, a pose." Girls, women, families, and even pets from days gone by grace the pages…”

We chose to highlight this item because there is something so nostalgic about being asked to stand out on the lawn - pose, take a photo and capture that moment in time, maybe in your Sunday best or on your first day of school. This collection item is a unique representation of "the lawn as a cultural construct" and presented in a eye-catching format.

To see more about this item, see the TGIF Database record: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/fullrecord?recno=259401

To see more items related to the lawn as a cultural construct, see:
https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/kewordticthes?key=%22Lawn+as+a+cultural+construct%22

This Friday, let’s flash back to this image from the Dr. James R. Watson, Jr. Image Archive! “Field day attendees view turf fertility research plots at Texas A&M University in 1952”

To learn more about this image, or to view more from this archive: https://d.lib.msu.edu/watson/59

Harriet Beard passed on April 25, 2023, and the world lost the other half of one of the most dynamic duos the turfgrass world has seen (and may ever see). Whether she was homemaking or working with Jim in the world of turf academia, Harriet had the confidence of a woman who knew what she wanted and worked tirelessly to get there. It never ceased to amaze me the boxes of materials she would pack up and send to us here at the Turfgrass Information Center – hundreds of printouts, serials, and monographs Jim deemed “done using”, neatly boxed and organized, sent monthly. Sometimes the dates on the printouts would be very late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, evidence of her commitment to the turfgrass scholarship she and Jim were invested in. This was also made clear by the many phone calls shared between Harriet, Jim, and Pete Cookingham. For over 10 years it was my honor to witness three incredibly dedicated academics work to advance the future and secure the past of turfgrass literature. All these observations left me no doubt why Harriet was always the dedicatee of Jim’s books – her input was instrumental to his success. Harriet leaves us a legacy of devotion to her family and to the wider turfgrass community. She will be missed by many, and certainly by us here at TIC. (egm)

To see the works by or about Harriet Beard: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/flink?BORA=Beard%2C+Harriet

Did you know that there is a way for you to link directly to an individual TGIF record? You can, when you use TGIF Fastlinks!

A “Single TGIF record Fastlink” can be described as a form of ‘deep linking’. Basically, this is the ability to create a URL to search inside the TGIF database and retrieve a specific TGIF record.

If you wish to recall this record again, simply use the generated URL at the top of the page! This may be useful for sending specific articles to friends or colleagues or to enhance a list of citations by adding individual links.

To use, visit: https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/flink

Did you know?

The Turfgrass Information Center builds, maintains, and utilizes a controlled vocabulary of thousands of terms strictly related to turfgrass science and culture in order to assign keywords to TGIF database records. These descriptors are connected through hierarchical relationships through broader, narrower, and related terms. Common synonyms and variants are also taken into consideration to capture historical, regional, and linguistic differences in terminology.

We have made our Thesaurus available to search and navigate; to access, click the “Thesaurus Search” tab within the TGIF Database. Type in the term that you are looking to explore, and you will receive a set of terms that are close to or match your query, along with an in-house scope note. In this example, 7 results appeared for “syringing”, including 4 close terms, one exact match, and two non-preferred matches.

By clicking on your desired term, you will land on a page that allows you to explore broader, narrower, and related terms, as well as any non-preferred terms. This page also allows you to display all TGIF records that have been tagged with your term. In this example, “syringing” appears in 182 TGIF records.

This feature is most useful when you have a topic that you would like to investigate further but may not know the most precise terms to search, or to investigate topics that are related in some way to your original query.

This we're looking at slide #12325 from the The Noer/Milorganite® Image Collection!

From the slide: " #1 Ice on G+F.; Woodland GC Waban Mass. 1/8/69"

To see this image or many more, visit: https://tic.msu.edu/noerslides/browse

A sneak peek at what's next on the TGIF Database processing shelves - Australian Turfgrass Management Journal. Enhance your turf knowledge with TGIF!
See: tic.msu.edu 🤓 ⛳

Throughout the lifetime of the Turfgrass Information Center we have been the grateful recipients of donations (many in-kind), that have not only deeply enhanced the collections we are building, but have also demonstrated the need for a safe repository for the legacy of turfgrass literature.

Pictured is the wooden donor board that stands within the MSU Libraries acknowledging our largest donors — but our deepest thanks go out to everyone who has supported or advocated for our mission over the last three decades, at any level.

Donor Board 2023 View the interactive image by Turfgrass Information Center

This October, we have a range of items that discuss how to protect and preserve golf course wildlife and their habitats. All materials are from the Noer Collection within the Turfgrass Information Center. - Come by and see our various displays throughout the year!

Can You Help? 🔍

If you should stumble upon turfgrass-related materials while cleaning out your office, please consider the Turfgrass Information Center. We're interested in a variety of items that would help fill gaps in both the physical and online collections.

And as the year draws to an end, and you start to consider your charitable contributions, don’t forget that your donation to TIC may be tax deductible!

Donations to TIC help grow the collections, while the collections themselves help support the TGIF database. No matter how many (or few) items you may have, we welcome the support.

To see if your items would be a good fit for TIC, email: [email protected]

In Memoriam – The TGIF Legacy:
Jerry Matthews (1934-2022)
https://tic.msu.edu/tgif/flink?BORA=Matthews%2C+Jerry

This , we encourage you to take time for yourself - not just today, but everyday. To care for others, we must first care for ourselves. It's ok to ask for help if you need it.

If you are going on an internship, or are planning on it, keep the TGIF Database in mind as your "secret tool". Use TGIF to find out information about the course you will be working on, or even the people you will be working with! Wow your co-workers right from the jump by brushing up on topics you know you will be working with!

As always, visit us online at tic.msu.edu and explore the TGIF Database and all associated digital assets. 🤓✍️📗

🌟 Staff Spotlight 🌟

Meet Kierra Jones! Kierra is a Library Assistant in the Turfgrass Information Center. In January 2022, Kierra joined the TIC staff full-time. During her time as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, Kierra worked as a student employee for three years in the Turfgrass Information Center, along with two years in the Vice President's Office of Student Affairs and Services. Kierra graduated in May 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. She then continued working as an on-call employee in TIC, and a temporary employee in Career Services, and University Services. Now, in the Turfgrass Information Center Kierra is responsible for the supervision of the descriptive monographs student group and support for TGIF outreach and engagement.

Look who popped in on Hawaiian shirt day – Pete!
What a fun way to celebrate the end of Summer! 🌺

Football is back! Seeing the beautiful fields can make anyone want to improve their own lawn to stadium quality. We're here to help. Come check out all of the information the TGIF Database has to offer! tic.msu.edu

Australian Turfgrass Management Journal celebrates the efforts of Australia's turf management professionals. The journal covers technical aspects of golf and sports turf maintenance, golf course design, tournament preparation, and professional development. The journal also profiles key figures and facilities in the Australian turf industry.
View the digital archive here: https://d.lib.msu.edu/austm

The TGIF Database includes information on all aspects of turfgrass care - including roadsides, rights of way, and how they intersect with erosion control! 🌱🚗

Check out TGIF today: tic.msu.edu