Abstract

Internet technology has created an environment that has expanded traditional bibliographic resources and provided exciting new sources of information to help counselors in their professional lives. Information literacy requires knowing how to access information effectively and efficiently.   This article will promote information literacy of counselors by discussing how to use the Internet to effectively and efficiently access sources of information about counseling and by offering suggestions on how to infuse information finding skills into the counseling curriculum.

        In this Information Age, to provide the best service to their clients and to promote their own lifelong learning, counselors need to develop information literacy. The American Library Association (ALA) has defined information literacy as having abilities to “recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” Being able to access information effectively and efficiently is one of ALA’s standards for an information literate individual. Psychologists, whose work settings are often similar to those of counselors, have reported that to carry out their job responsibilities they often needed information, and that they had to find it themselves (Hammond & Mitchel, 1997).  The Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) Guidelines for Technical Competencies for Counselor Education Students (1999)  recommend counseling students should be able (a) to help clients search for various types of counseling-related information via the Internet . . .  (b) to access and use counseling related . . . data bases, (c) to use the Internet for finding and using continuing education opportunities in counseling, and (d) to evaluate the quality of Internet information.    

        The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs standards (2001) indicate counselors should be familiar with the counseling research and literature by specifying that counseling programs must demonstrate application of research data and include instruction in technological competence and computer literacy.  Sexton (2000) called for more emphasis on research training in counselor education, having noted earlier (Sexton & Whiston, 1996) that counseling practitioners must be aware of what research is available. There can be no doubt that counselors need to become information literate to provide the best services to their clients and to promote their own lifelong learning.

        The Internet has created an increased number of sources from which counselors can access and learn about counseling research and obtain information to help their clients.  However, counselors may not feel sufficiently prepared to identify and utilize them.  Murry, McKee, and Hammons (1997) noted that graduate students reported that they feel unprepared to fully utilize library resources and insufficient attention had been given to bibliographic instruction. Various authors have addressed bibliographic instruction for psychology students (Bell & Benedicto, 1998; Carter & Daugherty, 1998; Merriam, LeBaugh, & Butterfield, 1992; Sutton, Feinberg, Levine, Sandberg, & Wilson, 1995), but none have addressed what counseling students need to know about bibliographic resources to be able to access information for themselves and their clients.  The Internet has expanded the nature of bibliographic resources by offering information on web sites and by increasing the accessibility and the number of databases that provide either indexing or full-text of the counseling literature.  So much information in various formats is available on the Internet, that it can be a challenge to find the most relevant information quickly.  This article will identify and describe information resources delivered via the Internet with which an information literate counselor should be familiar to effectively and efficiently access counseling literature and research.  

Web sites  

        Not all information is available on the Internet. Nor does an Internet connection guarantee access to all information that can be delivered via the medium, because not all Internet sites free. As an information environment the Internet is subject to rapid change and a lack of uniformity.  Specific sites may alter their addresses, contents, or even availability, while others may fail to load needed updates. The creators of web sites, their sources, and their credibility, can be difficult to determine.  

        Internet resources may include web sites of professional or government organizations, educational or scientific institutions, or  privately maintained sites, both commercial and non-commercial.  Counselors should be aware of the types of information providers associated with the common Internet address endings--.gov., edu, .org, or .com—and the new addresses--.info, .biz, .pro, .name, .coop, .museum, and .aero recently authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.  Although these addresses are not quality indicators, sites sponsored by governmental, educational, or scientific institutions are generally more credible than commercial or private sites.  Many Internet sites sponsored by these institutions provide an abundance of information at no cost.  

        The rapid proliferation and mutability of Internet sites quickly dates printed directories that identify them. Most Internet researchers employ commercial Internet search engines to identify web sites of interest.  Reviews and critiques of Internet search engines are available in print (Goldsborough, 2001) and on web sites (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/,  http://www.monash.com/spidap.html, http://www.twics.com/~takakuwa/search/search.html). Meta search engines like ProFusion combine the functions of other search engines.  Users of search engines should be aware of the criteria by which the engine selects web sites and the best strategies for searching.  Some search engines, such as Google provide excellent online help for users to develop search strategies. For those with subscription access, a useful database for identifying web sites is the On-line Computer Library Center’s (OCLC) NetFirst, which catalogs over 100,000 Internet sites and provides up-to-date concise descriptions and links to the sites. 

Electronic Journals

        The delivery of electronic journals in full text, and sometimes, even multi-media, is one of the Internet’s most exciting possibilities.  The Association of Research Libraries’ New Jour web site  lists journals and newsletters as they become deliverable via the Internet.  While some journals are available on the Internet for both education and psychology, Shroyer and Row (1999) found the Internet provided free full-text counterparts of only 2% of psychology journals.  Many sites associated with journals were promotional or existed to encourage either membership, subscription, and purchase of products.  They may offer a limited sample of full-text articles.  For example, the American Counseling Association’s (ACA) web site  requires membership in order to access the text of the Journal of Counseling and Development.  Similarly, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) web site offers information searches, but it is difficult to determine the extent of the database being searched or how to search effectively. An experienced researcher will quickly recognize that the results of APA’s site search are hardly comprehensive, but a new graduate student may not.  A sample of current journal articles can be downloaded in full text at the site, but subscription is necessary to access APA’s PsycINFO database and full text journals.  Counselors are often delighted by the massive amount of information they can access via the Internet, but they may not access much of the full-text of peer reviewed, scholarly sources of counseling research unless they have access to some of the major commercial databases.    

Electronic Databases Delivered Via the Internet  

        Computerization has allowed a proliferation of databases with powerful, user-friendly software. There are two useful databases for counselors, ERIC  and  Ingenta , available free on the Internet.  Another major free database is PubMed  that, although it provides less coverage of the counseling literature, may be useful to counselors concerned with client’s medical conditions.  However, with some exceptions, these databases are not full text, they are abstracting and indexing sources. 

        There are numerous commercial producers of databases that cover counseling literature and that can be delivered via the Internet through subscription. Vendors typically sell databases delivered via the Internet by licensing agreements that limit access.  Student researchers may not realize that they are able to access some journals in full text on their home computers because their university library has paid the subscription price or licensing fee for them. They are using their university’s computer as the host, and the site is recognizing them as a subscriber by reading the IP number.  Students may set up a proxy server through their university's computers to access these databases through their commercial Internet providers.  But graduates who no longer have the privileges of students are often confused and disappointed when they find they cannot access commercial databases via their own commercial Internet providers.  Various vendors have begun marketing to individuals.  This is another reason for counselors to be aware of what databases they need to best locate counseling research and literature.    

        Databases vary in (a) years and content covered, (b) indexing policies, (c) search software employed, and (d) frequency of updates.  Brief descriptions of major databases that include counseling research and literature follow.  Table 1 demonstrates the counseling content of these databases by comparing their coverage of the ACA division journals.  Becoming familiar with the best databases for the field means counselors will be able to identify the most relevant and reliable citations of scholarly publications.  

 ERIC  - Produced by the US government, ERIC is comprised of two indices, Resources in Education (RIE) and Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE).  While ERIC’s primary coverage is education, the social sciences are well represented and the education aspects of any field may be included. RIE covers documents that would not otherwise be widely available, including conference papers, research reports, state and federal publications, ERIC digests, and association publications.  Until recently, the ERIC microfiche archives, which began in 1966, were the only readily available collection of these 450,000 education-related documents. Most ERIC documents from 1993 on are available through E*Subscribe at ERIC’s web site (but not for free). ERIC digests are available full text in the database, and provide excellent summaries and bibliographies on various topics. For example, Jane Myers and Donna Gibson’s ERIC digest on “Technology Competence of Counselor Educators” can be found in (ED435947) full-text . CIJE began in 1969.  It provides citations and annotations of articles from over 700 journals, but the indexing is selective, so coverage of any given journal is not necessarily comprehensive. Table 1 shows that ERIC has more citations from ACA division journals than any other database.  Although ERIC does have the free web site, many researchers prefer to access the ERIC database using the more sophisticated software of commercial vendors, such as WebSpirs or OCLC's FirstSearch.   

Ingenta  – Ingenta is unique for several reasons.  It is comprised of tables of contents, with occasional annotations, electronically scanned daily from 25,000 journals.  Searching is free.  There is only keyword, no subject, indexing of the articles, so finding articles in the 1989 to date database requires the user to enter words that appear in the article title, in the journal name, or in the occasional abstracts.  Another unique feature of the database is its notification service that sends weekly e-mail with any new citations that match users’ customized search strategies.  It will also e-mail tables of contents for up to 50 journals whenever a new issue is published.  Ingenta charges only for the delivery of the full articles. Counselors in the field can (a) use Ingenta at no charge, (b) purchase the Ingenta alert service, and (c) buy needed articles.  

PsycINFO  – The electronic form of APA’s print index Psychological Abstracts is among the most important databases for counseling. PsycINFO currently indexes more than 1,300 journals. The database provides coverage, dating back to 1887, of journal articles, dissertations, technical reports, English language books, and other scholarly documents.  It covers the literature of psychology and counseling published in 45 countries and more than 30 languages. Abstracts are in English, but its international coverage means some articles are available only in other languages. PsycINFO indexes each publication in several searchable fields.  Among these fields are descriptors, the controlled terminology or subject headings, assigned by an indexer to each article.  The descriptors are listed in the printed Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (APA, 1997) and are often available in online versions.  The searchability of the database is further enhanced by the addition of a key phrase field where concepts frequently associated with the topic but not listed as descriptors, can be searched. The ability to limit by language, population, age, publication year, publication type, and other special features allows the user to focus a search.  Lackey (2000) has provided an excellent comparative review of different vendors’ delivery of the database.  Recently, PsycINFO’s market has begun to be challenged by the Data Access Group’s  e-psyche, which indexes 3,600 journals, dissertations, technical reports, newsletters, web sites, and conference proceedings.  Information Today’s Tom Hogan describes how e-psyche differs from PsycINFO .   Various vendors including EBSCO  offer e-psyche.   

Education Abstracts – H. W. Wilson’s Education Index, one of the venerable printed indexes, is now available online as Education Abstracts, and has been made more competitive by the addition of abstracts.  The database is smaller than ERIC, covering about 300 journals, but it also includes book reviews, and a few yearbooks.  In spite of its smaller size, the index is well designed, its subject headings so intuitive and its abstracts so descriptive, that researchers may find relevant articles more readily than in some bigger databases. Education Abstracts is sold in different packages, such as separately by FirstSearch, in WilsonWeb with full text of many journal articles, and by other vendors.   

ArticleFirst and ContentsFirst are companion databases produced by OCLC FirstSearch  and are similar to Ingenta.  They provide rapid indexing of new journal articles, well ahead of the other databases, because like Ingenta, they do not assign subject headings or provide abstracts.  ArticleFirst provides keyword access to article titles and to words contained in the journal name.  ContentsFirst allows users to search by journal name and displays the table of contents for any given issue published since 1989.  But unlike Ingenta, neither of these databases has an electronic notification service.  When the authors compared the coverage of ACA journals in Ingenta and ContentsFirst, they found that Ingenta covered a greater number of the ACA titles and provided slightly more rapid indexing of recently published journal issues of most, but not all, of ACA's journals.  

ProQuest   – Bell & Howell Information and Learning’s software delivers a variety of database packages, including one for psychology.  Users can search free text using natural language or they can search within specific fields such as author, publication title, subject headings, or even within the actual text of the article, if that article is available in full text in the database.  Users can limit the search parameters to peer reviewed journals or to full text articles. While ProQuest  provides indexing and abstracts from 1987 forward, its appeal is its delivery of full-text. However, like many other full-text databases, the full-text coverage of articles is recent, primarily mid-1990s to date.  

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) – This index is a computer-age phenomenon.  Developed by the Institute for Scientific Information ( ISI ) this database was first published in print for three areas: the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Until recently, it was the only database uniquely designed to provide libraries some new bibliometric tools.  SSCI offers keyword searches of the articles from 1,700 of the most cited scholarly journals in the social sciences. The design of the databases allows extensive statistical analysis of scholarly publications such as the generation of frequency and impact profiles for a subject area, journal, author, or article that would be enormously time-consuming to do manually.  For example, citation indexing indicates how often and where an author’s work is cited. The number of times a publication is cited provides an indication of the influence of the publication.  

WorldCat –OCLC, marketing their databases under their user friendly search software FirstSearch provides WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database in the world, comprised of 43 million records in 400 languages. WorldCat is a database of the catalogs of approximately 38,000 libraries in 76 countries.  It covers books and other monographs, videos, discs, records, tapes, scores, theses, dissertations, serials, software, and Internet sites.  It allows keyword and subject heading searches but has no abstracts, although content notes do sometimes give additional information.  

Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI)  For many years, this print index was the primary compilation of bibliographic information on doctoral theses from numerous American and some international institutions.  DAI does not cite as many dissertations as WorldCat, but its lengthy abstracts are searchable. The full dissertations can be borrowed through interlibrary loans or purchased. Electronic versions are beginning to be popular and are available from several sources, most notably the Networked Digital Library of Thesis and Digital Disserations and ProQuest's Digital Dissertations.   

Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (JAKE) – Yale librarians have compiled JAKE, a free database, to answer the question  “where is this journal indexed?”  JAKE currently covers approximately 194 databases that include over 23,000 journals.  It also indicates any electronic full-text sources.  JAKE does not provide access to the databases themselves, or to the journals covered by the databases, but it is a useful tool for researchers who want to know which databases index specific journals and which offer specific journals in full text. 

Counselors and Information Literacy  

        Information literacy must be integrated into the counselor training curriculum as “information literacy is recognized as making an important contribution to decision making, problem solving, independent learning, continuing professional development, and research” (Bruce, 1998, p. 25.).   Rader (1997) suggested that “information literate people are those who have learned how to learn” (p. 48) and that learning should (a) be interactive and integrated, (b) be based on information resources of the real word, (c) be collaborative, and (d) utilize current media technology.   

        Counselor educators’ collaborators in infusing information literacy into the counseling curriculum include librarians, who are trained in collecting and organizing the numerous information formats, in recommending appropriate sources, and in teaching library and information research skills.  Librarians may also help by teaching research classes, by advising counselors in their information research, and by creating web-based reference pages with bibliographies and Internet links to sources of counseling information.  An example of this is the Counseling and Marital and Family Therapy page developed by the librarians at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Important points for information literate students and counselors include:

• The Internet is not entirely a free source of unlimited information.   Various search engines are comparable to print directories in which those listed pay for that advertising.  Many information sources on the Internet require access privileges via subscription.  

• Delivery of full-text scholarly journals tends to be limited to recent publications of some, not all, journals. The majority of counseling research is published in scholarly books and journals that are still sometimes only available in traditional print format.  

• Search engines and databases are powerful tools to identify relevant counseling research and literature. Databases vary in their coverage of the counseling literature and need to be selected purposefully.  Effective researchers use multiple databases.  

• Internet delivery of information is a rapidly changing environment.  There is continual development that requires a proactive attitude toward lifelong learning to keep current with resources such as search engines and databases. 

        There is no doubt that counselor educators agree that counselors in training must become familiar with counseling research and literature and must have the technological skills to access counseling information.  One step in developing information literacy is being able to find needed information effectively and efficiently.  Many sources of information about counseling can be accessed on the Internet but to do so effectively and efficiently requires knowledge of search engines, web sites, and databases.  The counseling curriculum typically requires students to find counseling research and literature.  Students appreciate this knowledge when it is infused into the counseling curriculum.  For example, asking students to research a topic covered in class by using various tools such as different Internet search engines or different databases and comparing the results of searching. To do this, counselor educators must be familiar with the information sources of counseling research and must work collegially with library faculty to keep informed about technological and database developments.

References  

American Psychological Association (1997). Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, Washington, DC: Author.

Bell, C., & Benedicto, J. (1998). The companion course: A pilot project to teach discipline-specific library research skills. Reference Services Review, 26, 117-124.

Bruce, C. S. (1998). The phenomenon of information literacy. Higher Education Research & Development, 17, 25 – 43.  

Carter, E. W., & Daughterty, T. K. (1998). Library instruction and psychology – A cooperative effort, Technical Services Quarterly, 16, 33-14.   

Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs (2001) CACREP Accreditation Manual: 2001 Standards, Alexandria, VA: Author.  

Goldsborough, R. (2001) Searching for the best web sites around . . . or for whatever you need. Poptronics, 2 (6), 21-24.  

Hammond, , C., & Mitchel, E. (1997). Instruction for the professions: Information needs and libraries. Reference Services Review, 25, 79-87.

Lackey, M. (2000). PsycINFO: Comparative Review on SilverPlatter, Ovid, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, and OCLC FirstSearch, The Charleston Advisor, 1(3), 11-21.  

Merriam, J. LaBaugh, R. T., & Butterfield, N. E. (1992). Library instruction for psychology majors: minimum training guidelines. Teaching of Psychology, 19, 34 – 36.  

Murry, J. W. , Jr., McKee, E. C., , & Hammons, J. O. (1997). Faculty and librarian collaboration: The road to information literary for graduate students. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 8, 107-121. 

Rader, H. E. (1997). Educating students for the information age: The role of the librarian, References Services Review, 25, 47 – 52.  

Sexton, T. L. (2000) Reconstructing clinical training: in pursuit of evidence-based clinical training. Counselor Education and Supervision, 39, 218- 228.  

Sexton, T. L., & Whiston, S.C. (1996). Integrating counseling research and practice. Journal of Counseling and Development, 74, 588-589.  

Shroyer, A. & Rowe, C. (1999). Psychology journal content on the Internet: A case study in availability, Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 18, 21-32.  

Arden Unbrit Gale is an Employee Performance Development Counselor with the Internal Revenue Service in Atlanta, GA. Elizabeth Chadbourn McKee is Acting Head , Reference Department, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, AR. Her email is: emckee@uark.edu.