Working Together: Library Research

Scholarship is changing: we are on the journey together

At SAGE, we believe passionately that engaged scholarship lies at the heart of any healthy society and that education is intrinsically valuable. This vision drives our business and our actions. We are committed to supporting the scholarly communication chain and that includes being a collaborative partner with libraries. As the landscape for scholarly communication changes, so do our interactions with our library partners.

A future without librarians is no future. With this in mind SAGE offers a number of librarian travel grants each year to facilitate networking at major industry events. The recipient of SAGE's 2012 library travel grant for the ALPSP International Conference has been announced as Stephen Buck, EResources and Periodicals Librarian at Dublin City University Library. You can find out more here. We want to hear from you directly how we can be working together. In 2011, we appointed Elisabeth Leonard, a former librarian, as SAGE’s Market Research Analyst. Working with the library community internationally, Elisabeth’s role helps us to identify new and future needs. One of the key things we do is to hold regular Library Advisory Board groups to test current and new business models.  We also regularly hold focus groups, product usability testing, and informal meetings with libraries around the world.

Championing discoverability helps us to help your patrons. This year SAGE published a new white paper investigating how we improve discoverability through collaboration between librarians, publishers and vendors. Read this online here (PDF) or here (HTML). Drawing from interviews, case studies, and scholarly literature, the white paper assesses the current environment and proposed cross-sector conversations to further visibility and usage of scholarly communication.

We’re also helping to champion library value. In association with LISU (part of Loughborough University), we are facilitating a new report investigating best practice in library and researcher relationships. Read the results of this survey here, or alternatively listen to a podcast on the reports findings here.

We are working together for the future. The scholarly publishing landscape is changing rapidly. To ensure we’re able to support the scholarship of the future, SAGE is also hosting a round table on the future of Open Access with the British Library. We will be issuing a white paper sharing the findings of this discussion later in the year.

SAGE is an active member of the library community. We are an ALA Library Champion Sponsor and regularly participate in a number of other industry conferences. Being active in industry bodies and industry initiatives, SAGE is Counter compliant and is a founding publisher member of Project Transfer. Our staff host research events across library researcher-publisher stakeholders, speak at library conferences and contribute to library journals.

We also participate in Research4Life (HINARI, AGORA and OARE) which helps bring our high quality scholarship at little or no cost to thousands of institutions in the developing world. Our commitment also extends to our local community. The Newbury Park High School library (near SAGE’s corporate HQ in California) has been renamed the SAGE Library for our many contributions. In the UK, SAGE’s partnership with the University of Sussex saw the creation of the ‘Sussex Research Hive’.

“SAGE has made a major contribution to advancing our knowledge, pushing the boundaries of our thinking and making sure that important information was in our hands and on our minds.”—Marilyn Cochrane Smith, Boston College

Discovering the Impact of Library Use and Student Performance (EDUCAUSE Review)