Sage Publications made news in the library world in 2002 when it decided to remove its journals from many publishers' aggregated databases. The move was timed to enhance interest in direct access to Sage journals via the Sage Full‐Text Collections, a joint e‐journal publishing venture of Sage and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. There are currently four collections:
- 1.
Communication.
- 2.
Criminology.
- 3.
Politics and international relations.
- 4.
Sociology.
Two additional collections (education and psychology) are slated for release early in 2004.
These databases contain indexing and full text for many well‐regarded journals; online access to these titles is sure to be welcomed by librarians and researchers alike. They may be disappointed, however, to find that not quite all of the relevant Sage titles are available in any given collection. For example, the criminology collection includes neither Probation Journal nor International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. Similarly, the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships is excluded from the communication collection despite the fact that Sage lists it under Communication titles on their journal sales Web site. The title is slated for inclusion in the psychology collection due out in 2004, but it seems reasonable to include it under communication as well. There are several similar exclusions in each of the collections. The dates of full‐text coverage vary significantly between titles. Many titles are covered back to the early‐ to mid‐1990s, and some to the 1980s, but other titles are covered for only about five years. Mysteriously, International Relations, published since 1954, is only available in full‐text starting in 2001.
The interface for the Sage Full‐Text Collections is usable and has many desirable features, but it could be improved. The screen is divided into two frames, with a search‐building screen on the left and the majority of the screen devoted to displaying content. The search frame is a bit too long to display conveniently on a monitor with 800×600 resolution; thesaurus searching and options for combining previous searches appear far enough down the screen to require scrolling to find them. Users with a higher screen resolution will not have this problem. The search mechanism itself is fairly powerful. It supports several wildcard and truncation symbols, advanced Boolean searching, and a variety of proximity operators. The help files are extensive and useful. The database has a thesaurus of descriptors, although initiating a search from within the thesaurus could be made more intuitive.
Each entry includes the usual sort of bibliographic data and subject descriptors. The information is complete, but visually too spread out. Even for very brief pieces of information such as ISSN and publication year, each datum takes up two lines (one to give the name of the field, and the other to supply the relevant information). Unfortunately, the subject descriptors appear quite far down the page (after four lines of publisher information, even though that information is the same for all of the entries in this database). Such useful information could profitably be moved further up the page. In addition to the usual sort of bibliographic data and subject descriptors, each entry includes the article's bibliography. The bibliography contains links to abstracts and full text where possible (i.e. where CSA has index information for the article, or where the full text is in a CSA database licensed by the user's institution.) The bibliography entries also include links to other entries that include bibliographies citing the same articles.
The full text of the articles included in these collections is all provided in PDF format. The most recent few years of articles were created directly from the digital files and are therefore very conveniently small file sizes (usually around 100 KB). Most articles from before 2001, however, appear to have been scanned from hard copy, resulting in very large files that often exceed 2 MB and sometimes even 3 MB. This will not pose a serious obstacle to access for users with high‐speed connections, but will cause problems for those using a modem to access the Internet. The interface warns the user before opening PDFs larger than 1 MB, but does not allow the user to save the files to disk rather than open them directly. To allow the user this option would alleviate some of the difficulties of working with an extremely large file.
The interface does not support OpenURL traffic except from other CSA databases. This means that library users working in a non‐CSA database will not be able to link directly to Sage content even if the user's institution uses software to allow direct links to content in other databases. The choice not to support this increasingly‐accepted standard is disappointing. From a sales perspective one can understand Sage's move toward exclusivity as an attempt to drive users to their service, but such a strategy runs counter to efforts in the library world to create seamless linkages between resources.
This is a fairly strong database. The content is highly desirable and the interface is functional, if short of ideal. The full‐text‐only aspect will appeal to many users, but may also steer them away from other appropriate sources such as subject‐specific indexes with content from more than one publisher. Sage is not alone in creating a single‐publisher archive of its journals, but lack of OpenURL support is a serious concern. The content covered by this database is well‐respected, and Sage need not resort to such exclusionary tactics to ensure use of their product. It is to be expected that more libraries, not fewer, would subscribe if Sage and CSA were to add OpenURL support to the product.
