Counseling Self-Efficacy and Counseling Competence in Prepracticum Training

Counseling self-efficacy and counseling skills were examined over time in a graduate prepracticum class. Efficacy increased with training, but its relationship to performance of skills was weak.     

On Extending the Educational Goods Framework

In this review of the Educational Goods, the author provides a set of comments that might extend the worthy framework provided by Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift. In particular, the author calls attention to the ways in which continued work within this project might broaden its conceptualisation of educational goods, increase the scope of potential application of its framework and clarify its forward- or backward-looking character.     

‘Reading’ in the digital environment

For ten years CIBER has been studying the logs of scholarly publishers, and what was clear from the very beginning was that scholars conducted very brief visits to websites and spent very little time reading when there, yet publishers envisaged they would dwell; and if not dwell, then at least deep read the PDF later. Yet CIBER's research points to the fact that ‘lite’ reading is in fact endemic: younger people prefer it anyway and older people are getting used to it for the speed and convenience it brings. PDFs are largely a means of archiving and collecting and are not the gold standard reading metric people think. User satisfaction comes not from a PDF but from the ability to deep dive into a site and snatch what you are interested as quickly as possible. Publishers are still not comfortable with that and this article helps explain why they have to be.     

The second digital transition: to the mobile space — an analysis of Europeana

According to industry estimates the mobile device (smartphone and tablet) will soon be the main platform for searching the Web and yet our knowledge of how mobile consumers use information – especially scholarly information, and how that differs from desktop or ‘tethered’ users – is imperfect to say the very least. This article aims to correct this through an analysis of the usage logs of a major cultural, multimedia website, Europeana.eu, which started tackling the mobile challenge in 2011. The challenges of identifying mobile use – no easy matter – are described. The information behaviour of 150,000 mobile users is examined and compared with that for desktop users. The main findings are that mobile users are the fastest‐growing user community and that their visits are very different in the aggregate from those arising from desktops. Mobile visits are information ‘lite‘: typically shorter, less interactive, and with less content viewed per visit. Use takes on a social rather than office rhythm, with use peaking at nights and weekends.     

Book review

Copyright Questions and Answers for Information Professionals: From the Columns of Against the Grain Laura N. Gasaway West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 2013, 284pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐55753‐639‐6, £16.12, pbk