Michigan State University

The Turfgrass Information Center (TIC), a specialized agricultural database and outreach service, is a unit of the Michigan State University Libraries, in East Lansing, MI. Its focus is on grasses used in commercial applications, such as at horse racetracks, golf courses, and sports stadiums. The Center, which operates under the guidance and support of the TIC Advisory Council, a volunteer group of industry representatives, now contains the most comprehensive collection of turfgrass educational materials available in the world. The Center has over 125,000 records in its primary database, the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF), with over 30% linked to the full text of the item.

In 1984, the Center selected STAR for its database development and information retrieval system. At first, STAR was used primarily for in-house reference service but by 1988 it had become available online for all users and the Center was offering fax, e-mail, and online search services. A year later, the Center allowed users to save searches and load subsets to disk. In 1993, the Center began publishing a biannual index from STAR and distributing it to subscribers, along with custom bibliographies and, in 1994, well before searching on the Internet became ubiquitous, the Turfgrass database was made available on the World Wide Web.

The Turfgrass database is available only to a select group of users, mostly in academic and international organizations, that have contacts with the Center. The Center has no "known" location on the Internet--that is, the public cannot find it through listservs or gophers. However, authorized users of the database who cannot or do not use the Internet can continue to use the direct online access that the Center also supports.

URL: http://www.lib.msu.edu/tic