Members of the University of Notre Dame community now have access to Sage Campus and Sage Skills, two databases that help students learn and develop the necessary skills and research methods needed to successfully pursue their academic endeavors. 

“Although Sage is a publisher of traditional academic journals and books, it also offers a growing number of tools for student success,” Mark Robison, department head, Academic Collection Services, said. “These databases fill an important gap, as they support student success in ways that other library resources do not.” 

Earlier this year, it was announced that members of the campus community had access to Sage Explorer, a learning resource with more than 40,000 pieces of content. Through that subscription, students can also access Sage Campus and Sage Skills. 

Sage Campus allows students to learn academic skills that aren’t taught in a class. 

“Sage Campus offers longer, self-paced courses on a number of topics related to conducting research, including literature reviews, the journal article acceptance process, data visualization and even specific programming languages, like R and Python,” Robison said.

Sage Skills helps students to develop those academic as well as professional skills. 

“Sage Skills is full of short, interactive modules that build students' competencies in various areas, including data literacy, academic writing and study strategies,” he said.

Robison says that tools like Sage Campus and Sage Skills help students to become, “more efficient and balanced researchers.” 

“Students can use Sage Skills and Sage Campus to learn about research methods, tools and approaches,” he said. “These things are not intuitive; they must be learned. In turn, students can focus their energies on learning and research within the disciplines, rather than spinning their wheels figuring out how to cite references, or how to evaluate a dataset or how to manage their time.”

Although the databases are geared toward students — particularly Sage Skills, which helps undergraduate students new to navigating college — Robison says that students aren't the only ones who should check out the new resource.

“I would encourage anyone who works with undergrads to explore Sage Skills and become familiar with its modules and how they could support student success,” he says. Sage Campus has a broader appeal, not just to undergraduates and graduate students, but to anyone on campus who is learning a new research method or tool.”

Members of the Notre Dame community looking to use Sage Skills and Sage Campus can do so from anywhere worldwide by visiting the Hesburgh Libraries databases and searching for each of the databases by their name. The link will automatically direct anyone off campus to authenticate through Okta. Visitors to campus and members of the public may also access it and other library e-resources using the library’s guest computers.

For more information, contact Mark Robison, Hesburgh Libraries.