Members of the Sports Turf Association (STA) and the greater turfgrass industry now have access to the complete back files of the Sports Turf Manager (STM) and its predecessor the Sports Turf Newsletter through a partnership between the STA and Michigan State University’s Turfgrass Information Center (TIC).
In the past, STM readers could search the cumulative index on the STA website for article citations, or subscribers to the TIC’s Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) could search for articles but would obtain only the abstract. In either case they would have to physically obtain the article themselves. Digitization provides a much more usable tool, removing the step of having to go and find a particular issue of STM, assuming readers even had access to it. Through the new online digitized archive readers can browse year-by-year or search by term to retrieve PDF files of articles.
The addition of the full content of the publication is the result of the cooperation and dedication of TIC and MSU staff and students, involving more than 87 issues of the magazine, 1,300 pages of material, manually splitting nearly 1,400 PDFs, harvesting the citations for more than 400 turfgrass-related citations and linking more than 900 citations to the PDFs. As part of the ongoing cooperative project as new issues are produced materials will be scanned and made available six months following the date of publication.
Sports Turf Association members continue to enjoy complete subscriber access to the Turfgrass Information File, the most comprehensive publicly available collection of turfgrass educational materials in the world, via the Michael J. Bladon Educational Link. Simply login for access to the 'Members Only' section of the website.
The Turfgrass Information Center, a unit of the Michigan State University Libraries, was founded in 1984 to both continue building the O. J. Noer Memorial Turfgrass Collection, and begin construction of what became the USGA Turfgrass Information File (TGIF). TGIF has since become the largest online database serving turfgrass science and management, with worldwide coverage of all sectors of the turfgrass industry. With the arrival of the James B Beard Turfgrass Library Collection in 2003, TIC also became a center for scholarship and study of turfgrass science. Since that time, additional focus on building and hosting digital archives has become a primary activity of TIC. For further information on the Center, the Noer or Beard Collections, the digital collections, or TGIF, please begin at TIC's website.
In the words of Samuel Johnson...knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it!