eReviews

Alexander Street Pr., ctiv.alexanderstreet.com

CONTENT Counseling and Therapy in Video (CTV) comprises 285 videos totaling roughly 314 hours of content (when complete, it will hold 400 hours and more than 330 videos). The collection, which comes from the catalogs of Microtraining Associates, Psychotherapy.net, and the University of Manchester Department of Psychiatry, targets those studying psychiatric counseling, psychology, psychotherapy, and social work, allowing them "to see, experience, and study counseling in ways never before possible."

The videos are presented from multiple perspectives, and searchable transcripts are synchronized to video, so researchers can "drill down in seconds to find the footage of interest from hundreds of hours of video." Several types of videos make up the collection, including Counseling sessions and demonstrations, Consultations, and Lectures, presentations, and interviews.

USABILITY The screen opens with an attractive banner at the top, presumably showing individual and group counseling sessions. At the bottom of the banner is a toolbar with links to Home, Browse, Search, Playlists, What's New, and Help, as well as a simple Search box with a drop-down menu to search in All, Title, Transcripts, Therapy Type, Therapist, Subject, or Themes. As material is added to the collection, it shows up under the What's New link on the homepage.

Below the banner at screen left is a column of links to ways in which you can Browse the collection: All Videos, Subjects, Therapy Types, Therapists, Themes, Clips, and Video Types. To the right of this column is a Welcome statement, with a link to "View the guided demonstration," and beneath that is a series of four featured clips, with a link to Browse All Titles.

I started out by watching one of the featured videos, wanting to get a feel for what kinds of things I could expect to find here. I chose to watch "Counseling Latino Children and Adolescents: Cross-Cultural Issues," in which several individuals were taped role-playing different counseling interactions and illustrating various counseling techniques. These included Racial harassment: ineffective example; Racial harassment: more effective example; Parental awareness; Names the problem appropriately; Finds solutions in strengths; Cultural supports; School system actions; Parent comments; Using first language-establishing rapport; Assessing family's acculturation; Brainstorming solutions; Addressing similarities and differences; and Making acculturation connections.

Each video is quite lengthy, but since a transcript is following along with the video as it plays, you can skip forward to the most relevant segments pretty easily. You can also call up segments through a Clips tab, and you can get a quick summary of the session via an Abstract tab.

Links higher up the screen lead you to Transcripts (only), View Thumbnails (from throughout the video), Add to Playlist (if you sign into the system you can save clips and playlists), Embed/Link (to reference the video from another web page), and Print, which prints the transcript in a print-friendly format.

Next, I went back to the homepage and Browsed under Subjects. There are over 300 subjects and "sub" subjects listed, ranging from Ability to Early recollections to Genograms to Listening to unconditional positive regard.

By clicking to Show All Items, I found Bullying under Subject Behavior and clicked on it. That brought up five different videos: Counseling Latino Children and Adolescents: Cross-Cultural Issues; Depression and Suicidal Behavior in Adolescents; Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgendered Counseling: Skill-Building Vignettes; Object Relations Child Therapy; and Surviving Racism: A Message to People of Color—all of which had pertinent segments.

At this point, I went to the homepage and did a simple search for "bullying," getting five hits in Transcripts and five hits in Subjects. Interestingly, in the Transcripts' listing I got Creating More Satisfying Lives: A Live Demonstration of Happenstance Career Theory; Neuroscience and Counseling: Integrating New Research Into Practice from a Wellness Base; Neuroscience and the Brain: Implications for Counseling and Therapy; and The Psychology of Working: Expanding our Vision to Affirm Race and Culture, in addition to one video found by Browsing Subjects. The Subject hits were the same ones found in the Browse list.

PRICING Outright purchase of CTV ranges from $10,400 to $35,000, depending on an institution's annual materials budget and FTE (with an annual web access fee of $250). Subscriptions range from $1500 to $3600 per year, depending on the number of concurrent users.

BOTTOM LINE The content here is astonishingly deep, broad, and expert, as well as unique, and you are not going to find anything even remotely similar online. The quality of the videos is excellent, the side-by-side default display of video playing screen left with transcript tracking with yellow highlights screen right makes it easy to maneuver skillfully within a wealth of material.

The redundancies between browsing and searching make it quite certain that you will find what you're looking for quickly. Frankly, this is one of the most absorbing resources I've seen recently—and that says a lot. The design is deceptively simple (in a good way) and, when combined with all the aforesaid elements, makes for a highly effective tool that rates a strong ten.

Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries supporting the training of counselors and therapists.