If you’re a golfing fan, you may have often admired the lush golf courses and wondered how they keep the grass so green and perfect. No doubt that lots of research into turfgrass and its maintenance played an important part. A topic which interests not only the sports industry but also landscape architecture, horticulture, parks and recreation, and environmental policy.

Researchers and students in these areas have a valuable resource in the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) database – a bibliographic database exclusively dedicated to indexing turfgrass literature. Jointly designed by the United States Golfing Association Turfgrass Research Committee and the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries in 1983; it is now managed by the Turfgrass Information Center, a division of MSU Libraries.

The TGIF database gathers together information from a wide variety of sources regardless of sector, context, geography, or language: from peer reviewed publications, to popular magazines, to fact sheets and brochures, to name but a few. The materials are primarily in English, but non-English languages are included as well. Subject coverage includes the biology of turfgrass, its care, use and maintenance in sports, urban centers, lawn and landscape management, and much more.

Over 60% of the 300,000+ indexed records provide full text links in compliance with copyright permissions. For other record items, users will need to request a full text copy from a library or some other provider. To aid with navigation, there is a compiled resource list available for database users including tutorial videos, a “Getting Started” guide, and an academic worksheet intended for classroom sessions. These short (3-6 min.) videos do an excellent job of demonstrating the different search interfaces: Basic (most popular), Guided (for complex searches), Power (field searching, Boolean and proximity operators) and Rapid (for browsing by Topic, Periodical, and Material Type).

The results summary table (see figure 1) gives the item type, title (linked where available), author and source information, More Details (links to the full item record), and the TGIF#. Helpful ‘Search Options’ and ‘Search Hints’ are accessible by clicking the small arrow to reveal the tables (see figure 2).  The first column allows you to select individual records for display. There are also options for downloading records as a CSV file (comma separated) or for export to bibliographic reference software (*.ris file).

Here comes the really good news! At the recent USAIN 2020 Virtual Conference in July, Andrew Lundeen (Digital Projects Librarian, MSU Libraries) announced that TGIF will become open access in the third or fourth quarter of 2020. In the meantime, a username and password are being made freely available. Please visit tic.msu.edu/SPRINGTURF for access information.

Sabine Lanteri, Science Liaison Librarian, University of Delaware.

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