New: Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works

Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works is a searchable online collection of real transcripts of therapy and counseling sessions and first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and its treatment, as well as reference works to contextualize the primary material. We’re please to announce this new subscription for those looking for primary sources or background information in counseling and psychology.

You may search across the entire product, browse by transcripts, narratives, reference works, or navigate based on subjects, symptoms, and therapies. See the Users’ Guide for more information on how to use the collection.

For a sample of reference material, see The Handbook of Counseling, by Don Locke, Jane E. Myers and others. Browse by chapter or search within the book to find discussion of core principles of and issues in the counseling profession. For a sample of session transcripts, see the Verilogue Transcript Series, dating from 2007.

New: Counseling and Therapy in Video

Counseling and Therapy in Video provides an online collection of video for the study of counseling, human services, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling.

The collection allows you to see, experience, and study counseling in ways we’ve never been able to offer online. Watch consultations, counseling sessions (both authentic and acted), demonstrations, interviews, and lectures in topics such as education, family and relationships, and substance abuse. Over 40 types of therapies are shown or discussed, including cognitive behavioral therapy and group counseling. When complete, it will include 400 hours and more than 330 videos.

Considering using these videos in class? You can create both video clips and playlists to single out scenes or scenarios of interest to you.

Quosa Training June 22 and 23

QUOSA is a tool to help you download and manage full-text. It is built to work with PubMed and a few other databases. A trainer from QUOSA, Dr. Eszter Hars, will present 4 one-hour demonstrations for interested JHU faculty, staff, and students.

Monday, June 22, 2009
Bloomberg School of Public Health, Room W2030
10:45 - 11:45 am
12:15 - 1:15 pm
2:00 - 3:00 pm

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Eisenhower Library, M Level, Electronic Resource Center
9:00 am - 10:00 am

With QUOSA you have access to:

• Automated full-text retrieval from PubMed and other databases
• Full-text search and highlighting
• Copyright-compliant sharing
• Customizable alerts with automatic full-text retrieval

These sessions have been sponsored by the Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Safari Books Online: Computer Manuals and Business Books

We’ve had lots of requests for this particular resource and we’re very happy to announce that we’ve been able to obtain access to Safari Books Online. This is a set of electronic books that focuses on computer manuals (O’Reilly, Pearson, IBM, Adobe, etc.) and business books (Stanford, Wharton, etc.). Also included are instructional videos from lynda.com and New Riders.

You can search the full text, the section headings, or just the code. The results show the books in one tab, and the videos in another tab.

Only 7 JHU people at a time can look at Safari, so please remember to close out when you’re finished. If you’re familiar with SciFinder Scholar, you’re familiar with this sort of arrangement.

New Look for CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook has long been a trusty resource for information about the nations of the world. This past Monday they introduced a new website design, which makes navigation easier and adds some new functionality. One of the most useful new functions is the ability to rank countries by basic measures. This function can be found under References - Guide to Country Comparisons. A few examples include countries ranked by Internet users, life expectancy at birth, and length of railway network.

Their map navigation has been improved, and their regional maps are wonderful. Please take a look at this very useful resource.

Reader Beware!

Blogs and email lists are buzzing with the latest news about Elsevier, the large STM publishing corporation. Elsevier publishes many highly respected journals like Brain Research Reviews and Biomaterials. Most of their journals are peer-reviewed and trustworthy.

The Scientist reports that in the first years of this decade Elsevier partnered with pharmaceutical companies to create “journals” that were actually advertisements. The editorial content was influenced by the sponsoring companies and the articles were reprints from other journals. Elsevier has acknowledged the problem and announced changes to its procedures.

When we talk with you about doing literature research, we try to emphasize the need to assess the authority and credibility of a source. The kind of marketing-masquerade that happened here is difficult to identify and discuss. If just the editorial content was influenced, are the research articles still considered unbiased? You need to know how the research articles fit in with the rest of the literature to make that sort of determination. Please talk with your liaison librarian if you have any questions about this aspect of literature research.

“S” is for “Science Fiction”

It’s summer movie season again! Summer is prime time for science fiction and fantasy — this year’s films include series such as Star Trek, Harry Potter, and Terminator, as well as fine newcomers such as “Time Traveler’s Wife” and “Moon.” But if the big screen isn’t satisfying your cravings, browse through our long list of sci fi/fantasy films by using the advanced keyword search as shown. You’ll find more than 200! Happy viewing.

Summer Reading, or, How will you spend your summer “vacation”?

Endless stretches of time before us, lazy hazy days and long hours of sunlight. And yet, the perennial question: what should we read this summer? We all have lists of long-neglected classics we intend to read, someday. One summer not too long ago, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and found it a life-changing experience (the subject perhaps of another blog post).

War and Peace, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick: all candidates for a book that must be read. Or maybe something more modern (not to mention a little lighter!)?

What will you choose this summer? Here are a few ideas to help you in your quest:

• Browse the McNaughton Books on M-level of the library
• New York Times Summer Reading page
• Check out this guide to finding fiction in the library
• My favorite places to find new books: New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books
• Summer Reading resources for families with kids
• And here’s a list of summer reading lists

My own choice? A book I’ve been meaning to read for years: Robert Musil’s A man without qualities.

Featured: Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)