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Monday, May 7, 2012

10,000 Strong and Growing!


(Bridget Werderman and Elizabeth Lyons)

The Turfgrass Information Center is proud to announce the impressive accomplishments made by Descriptive Serial Team Supervisors Elizabeth Lyons and Bridget Werderman. Together, they have succeeded in attaining the second and third highest record creation numbers, respectively, in TIC student employment history. Elizabeth began working in the Turfgrass Information Center of June 2010, and has since created 8,137 records. Bridget began her employment in September 2008, and has created an equally impressive 5,900 records. Both Elizabeth and Bridget took a few minutes to sit down and talk about their experience here at TIC, as well as future plans.

What has been your favorite part of working at TIC?
Elizabeth - The people are nice, with an easy-going, friendly office atmosphere.
Bridget - Completing SERCHECKIN. (Ed. Note - SERCHECKIN is the final quality control check for descriptive records.)

Do you feel working at TIC entering descriptive records has provided you with "take-away" skills?
Elizabeth - Yes, it teaches you to proofread well, and become more detail-oriented.
Bridget - Yes, it helped me during an internship working with records of inventory. It also taught me the necessity for precision in data entry.

What did you think of turfgrass before you started here? What do you think now?
Elizabeth - I used to work for Plant and Soil Sciences at MSU, so I understood the research aspect. Now, I'm more aware of turf, such as diseases and the time and dedication necessary for growing it.
Bridget - Previously, I didn't know what it was. Today though, I know it's highly involved.

Has entering thousands of descriptive records changed the way you feel about databases/indexes? If so, how?
Elizabeth - Now, I'm more aware of the manpower involved in operations like this, things like TGIF don't just appear and it takes a long time to create. It's a complicated process of accumulating, inputting, correcting records and so on.
Bridget - It gave me an appreciation for the thousands of records in other databases, and the amount of work it takes to create it.

What are your post-graduation plans?
Elizabeth - I will continue to work at TIC through the summer, and then I'm hoping to go to Japan in the fall. Hopefully by 2013, I'll have my 2 year placement for JET (The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program).
Bridget - I'm moving to Richmond, Virginia in 3 weeks to begin my rotational program in supply chain management for 2 years.

Our database is built by the dedicated work of student employees, and Bridget and Elizabeth are no exceptions. We would like to thank them both for their years of hard work and all their contributions. We wish them the very best in all their future endeavors!

Monday, April 30, 2012

BIGGA Signs TGIF Access Agreement

The British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association (BIGGA) have secured an agreement with the Turfgrass Information Center to provide some members with access to the TGIF database.  These BIGGA members can access TGIF through the Members area of the BIGGA website, and they join the growing list of groups, organizations, academic institutions, corporations, and annual subscribers who can access the sizeable TGIF database and all the public- and restricted-access electronic resources hosted by the Turfgrass Information Center.

Friday, April 20, 2012

It's the End of the Week - Time to Take a Break!

Why not delve into TIC's Full-Text Resources?

Within, you'll find great publicly available archives for both old and new publications such as Sports Turf Manager (spanning from 1987 until as recently as 6 months ago!) as well as the latest USGA Green Section Record.

If you are a TGIF subscriber, either directly or through a blanket agreement for universities, organizations and corporations, you have the added bonus of logging into TGIF to explore the restricted-access archives as well.

Dig in, and enjoy the weekend!

Monday, April 16, 2012

Exclude This Blog Post!

Here at the Turfgrass Information Center we are dedicated to serving the needs of all users of our products. That's why based on feedback we've implemented a new TGIF database feature - the ability to exclude blog records - that may help some users get to desired search results quicker and easier. Although blog entries can be great for providing specific experiences and case studies, their quantity can sometimes cause other search results for records such as reports of original research or fact sheets to fall lower in the results.

To use this new option, start at TGIF's "Guided Search"; records for blog posts can be removed from the search results by checking the "Exclude blog records" box.

It is important to recognize that the addition of this feature was spurred by user suggestions. We like to think of ourselves as a very heavily-driven-by-user-feedback operation; as such user comments on issues such as scope-of-coverage, record structure and presentation, and interface design are both very much welcomed and appreciated, as we continue to work aggressively to improve the TGIF database.

Friday, April 13, 2012

A Small Jump!

Recently we made a slight change to the search display of TGIF – is it noticeable yet?

That's right; TGIF's default display now shows 25 results of an executed search on each page. In the past, TGIF defaulted to 10 results per page in order to cut down on retrieving and loading times.

Today, due to faster technology, we can offer an expanded search results screen with little fear of slowing down the searching process for our users.

To receive either more or fewer results with a search, change the "Records/Screen" dropdown at the top of the results page to "10" or "All."

Thursday, April 12, 2012

200,000 Reasons to Use TGIF!

The Turfgrass Information File has reached another major milestone as our number of original descriptive records has surpassed 200,000! (Some past milestones here and here). A little TGIF history: Our very first original descriptive record was created in September of 1984. From then we've kept the gears turning for a steady 28 years to reach this momentous occasion. We would like to thank all of our staff as well as our student employees over the years that have helped us to achieve such an amazing goal! Without these fantastic people TGIF would not have been able to grow in quantity and quality to become the quintessential turfgrass information resource it is today. And of course, we will continue to expand and improve our database striving for that next milestone!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Unified TGIF Login Page

The Turfgrass Information Center has simplified the three webpages to get to the TGIF database (either directly or by routing to another website's member-only area) into one single webpage, http://turfweb.lib.msu.edu/login.htm. Some TGIF database users may have a direct "pass-through" logon link and for those there is no change.

Here's a summarization of the changes:

• Those at subscribing academic institutions who used to click either this "Enter" button
  
  
  
  or the "Log on" button or the name of your academic institution
  
  
  
  will now click the "On Campus" link
  
  

• Those associated with subscribing academic institutions but off-campus who used to click their corresponding institution's off-campus link in this column
  
  
  
  will now click their institution's link from the "Off-Campus Access to TGIF" section
  
  

• Those who belong to organizations with blanket access agreements, corporations with access agreements, and Michigan residents who used to click their appropriate link here:
  
  
  
  will now choose their appropriate link here:
  
  

• Those individuals with a User ID and Password who used to fill in this section:
  
  
  
  will now fill in this section:
  
  

Questions or comments, especially if a subscribing institution does provide off-campus access to TGIF (normally via a proxy of some kind) and it is not linked under "Off-Campus Access to TGIF", please let us know!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

TIC Gets New Mailing Address

Michigan State University is in the process of updating their campus addressing system to switch to locatable street addresses in lieu of building names and numbers. As such, the Turfgrass Information Center has a new mailing address, effective immediately:

Turfgrass Information Center
Michigan State University Library
366 W. Circle Drive W301A
East Lansing, MI 48824-1048
USA

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

AGCSA Subscribes to TGIF

The Australian Golf Course Superintendents Association (AGCSA) has signed up for annual subscription access for its members to the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF). AGCSA members can access TGIF by logging in to the members' area of the AGCSA website and clicking on the TGIF submenu next to the ATM Archive.

AGCSA members' access further increases the availability of the TGIF database to contributing cooperator groups, which include ASGCA, AEdG, CGSA, GCSAA (Class A, SM, C, ISM, AA, and A-RT), MAGCS, STA, STMA, TPI, WGCSA, and state of Michigan residents. The full list, with links to respective login areas, is available at: http://tic.msu.edu/membernonsubscriber.htm

Friday, February 24, 2012

TIC Annual Report 2011 Now Available

The fifth Annual Report of the Turfgrass Information Center is now available. The report is called TIC Annual Report 2011 and is linked from the TIC public website. Highlights for the year include:

• 1.3+ million search results presented
• 46% of TGIF records now link to full text
• 21,000+ new TGIF records
• 5.6+ million PDFs displayed of TIC-hosted materials
• 67 academic subscribers worldwide

Monday, February 20, 2012

The DMC and TIC: A Perfect Pair
(by Elisabeth Mabie)

In 2005, a concerted effort was made across the board by the Turfgrass Information Center to proactively expand the availability of full-text and digitized turf-related materials online; in 2005, only 21% of TGIF records provided full-text. Today, it remains a major goal of the Turfgrass Information Center (TIC) to link our records to full-text materials; as of February 2011, nearly 44% of records in TGIF linked to the full document. To accomplish this goal, TIC works collaboratively with the Digital and Multimedia Center (DMC) of the Michigan State University Libraries. The DMC is run by John Shaw and is assisted by Laura Carter and Grace Metz, in addition to the 22 students employed to help run such an extensive center. Both the DMC and TIC are within the MSU Libraries’ Digital Information Unit, of which Shawn Nicholson is Assistant Director.

The DMC provides several multimedia and technical services to the both the students of Michigan State University and the staff who work within it. Two of the MSU Libraries’ Collaborative Technology Labs are housed within the Digital and Multimedia Center, both an interactive white board lab and a SmartBoard lab.

DMC houses well over 11,000 movies available for viewing and rental as well as maintaining sets of course reserves in electronic format to support current MSU classes. These materials are available to use in any of the 46 deluxe user carrels that are decked out with various media equipment. The DMC provides information and advice to all faculty, staff and students regarding both hardware and software purchases as well as counsel on audio, video or print digitization.

The majority of work done within the Digital and Multimedia Center is scanning services and digitization. DMC has two main clients for whom they provide scanning services: MSU Libraries’ Special Collections and the MSU Libraries’ Turfgrass Information Center. They also simultaneously produce work for other MSU Libraries collections; currently this client is Michigan State University’s Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics.

The DMC is capable of scanning a vast array of materials using any of their several high-tech scanners. For single sheets without extensive binding, Canon imageFORMULA DR-9080C Color Production Scanners are used. These Canon sheet feed scanners are capable of scanning 50 color pages-per-minute in portrait mode. On occasion, an Epson Expression 100000XL Graphic Arts flatbed scanner is used on smaller bound objects for its capability of concurrently scanning both sides of a large book or image in detail.

A scanner often employed is the Bookeye 3 which are able to scan images, text, and even 3-D objects in black and white, grayscale, and color. Bookeyes are perfect for batch scanning, something the Digital and Multimedia Center does a large share of. The Bookeye scans books and magazines at 400 pixels per inch (ppi) on a flatbed measuring 24x36 inches, and its camera can capture a color scan in 3 seconds at 400 pixels per inch (ppi). Though DMC does not utilize these features, opting instead for keeping original/untouched master TIFF files, the Bookeye features “book fold correction” which can automatically “flatten” the book fold and leaves no shadow.

For items measuring as large as 33 x 46.5 inches, the DigiBook SupraScan A0 planetary scanner can be used. This scanner may be considered the “big gun” of scanning, boasting a high-resolution motorized camera of the sort used in spy satellites. This camera is capable of capturing images in 300-600 ppi, and includes features such as a sensor calibrated to measure the distance between the work and the camera, a motorized cradle to hold the work in progress, moving lights to cover the entire work surface, and bi-directional scanning. The SupraScan is ideal for fragile, oversized or bound objects.

After the scan, a student employee then takes the scanned images and processes them by cropping, rotating and checking for quality of the scans. These images are then turned into OCR’d PDFs using AbbyyFineReader 10 Professional Edition. (OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows scanned documents and images to be turned into useable data such as a word processing file). After an entire document has completed this process, it is sent to a round of final quality control; this involves a page by page check of each scan using the original item as the control. If a PDF does not meet standards or is an incorrect file, the incorrect/missing pages are scanned again. Each client for whom they perform scans has their own set of standards related to how the document in question will be used and stored. Once every piece matches expectations, the uncorrected images stored as TIFFs are kept in a dark archive, while the issue-level PDFs go to coordinating project managers.

Mike Schury is the project manager of digitization projects within the Turfgrass Information Center. There, his team uses these issue-level PDFs to create digital archive projects for which TIC has contracts with publishers or other copyright holders.

As in DMC, the TIC team is made up of dedicated students who act as the driving force behind project completion. First, a table of contents is created for each issue processed to match the publication’s content. The issue-level PDF then undergoes a process of splitting and linking so as to extract individual articles and page segments and link them to an archive website. The issue-level PDF is typically split in two ways: each article within may be extracted individually and segments of usually 10 pages at a time may be extracted as a group. The splitting of articles is most useful to the users who would like to access the article they are searching in the easiest manner possible. This means that if an article begins on page 55 but continues on page 10, the user does not have to go through the hassle of searching the entire PDF for its continuation. Instead, the article is split to include only the pages to which it pertains and in the order of the article (page 55, then page 10 in this example). On the other hand, page segment PDFs help in representing the physical issue electronically - users can flip through it as they would the print publication, including full page advertisements that would not be included in an article split. After the splitting and linking has been completed, each PDF and the linked table of contents page is triple-checked for accuracy to maintain the high quality of the digital archive.

The finished product can be seen within our Publicly-Accessible and Restricted-Access Full-Text Archive sites at http://tic.msu.edu/pubjrnlbrowse.htm. Publically available journals include titles such as SportsTurf and the USGA Green Section Record; these are available for viewing by the general public, through corresponding TGIF records or by conducting a Google search for the desired title. OurRestricted-Access archive sites feature Golf Course Management, Turf News and many more, which are available to TGIF subscribers and to each cooperating organization's membership via that group's website.

If a collaborative digitization agreement or other arrangement with TIC is of interest to you, information regarding this can be found at: http://tic.msu.edu/fulltext.html

Inquiries can be directed to Pete Cookingham at cooking1@msu.edu

Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Passing of Geoffrey Cornish

Geoffrey S. Cornish, one of the deans of golf course design as well as the scholarship and history associated with the profession, passed away this past week at the age of 97. The Canadian-born but Massachusetts-based architect bridged agronomy and design, academics and practice, past and present, theoretical and practical, and geography over a career that began in the 1930’s.  Universally respected by his colleagues, he will be remembered for not only being the most prolific golf course architect in New England, but also for the wealth of documentation he created and inspired.

See also: ASGCA Press Release: http://www.asgca.org/news/579-geoffrey-cornish-asgca-fellow-dies-at-97

Materials written or recorded by or about Geoffrey Cornish as listed in TGIF, including his books: http://www.lib.msu.edu/cgi-bin/flinkbora.pl?name=cornish,%20g

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

TGIF Indexing Comparison Update

The Turfgrass Information Center is pleased to report that a newly updated version of the "Indexing Comparison" table for TGIF is now available from http://tic.msu.edu/comparison.html. This table compares TGIF against six other datasets, including Google Scholar, searching for 28 selected turf-related serial sources. Coverage is for materials published between 1990-2010. This comparison demonstrates the continued expansion of the TGIF database as a valuable resource for turf practitioners, professors, students, corporations, organizations, associations and individuals worldwide.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Dig Deeper Added to TGIF's Basic Search

"Dig Deeper" has now been implemented on the TGIF database's Basic Search page. Dig Deeper enables the searching of the complete text of items, as opposed to only the TGIF record's citation, abstract, and assigned keywords for the item. As explained in the June 28, 2010 blog post, using Dig Deeper greatly enhances the ability to find even the most obscure occurrences of terms buried deep within the body of the literature. One word of caution – as of right now around 25% of the records in TGIF have underlying full-text that will be searched using Dig Deeper, but that is still 43,000+ records!

Friday, January 6, 2012

2011 TIC's Best Record-Creation Year Ever

Blowing out of the water the 2009 achievement of 15,049 new records, 2011 saw the addition of over 20,000 records to the Turfgrass Information File database - more than any year since the database began in 1984! This is just one of many highlights from 2011 that will be further detailed in the upcoming TIC Annual Report 2011. If you wish to receive an electronic copy of this directly emailed to you, sign up by sending us an email!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Best Wishes, and with Thanks, to Jim Snow!

Jim Snow, National Director of the USGA Green Section for the past 21 years, and 14 before that as a regional agronomist, has retired effective 1 January.

Jim’s role in the evolution of the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) has been a fundamentally critical one, throughout the evolution of the effort. As our largest single external content and financial supporter over the first 25 years of the TGIF project , USGA has made the difference – and Jim has been point person in that interest.

So with great thanks and a hearty Godspeed, our hat is off to Mr. James Taft Snow. All the best, Jim!

For further information about Jim Snow’s career, see this nice write-up: http://www.usga.org/NewsSF.aspx?id=21474844028