Tips: Get More From the Directory

Take Advantage of these Helpful Features

Specialized: This directory is very specialized, and has hand-picked resources for mental health professionals, so you may be able to save a lot of time in finding search tools, free journal reading, literature research help, clinical news, tools, and reference materials. The resources are annotated, and you can add your own comments and resources to the pages.

Tools: Don't miss the Special Purpose Resources area that contains a good variety of Reference, Search, & Research Tools. This might be your favorite part.

Help from the outline: The directory has an outline structure designed for mental health professionals. But this outline can help you browse and discover resources.

Bread crumbs: Above the text, a feature called bread crumbs shows you the each topic that is a level higher than the previous one, going right to left, until it says "home." Home is the Psych In page that includes the directory and various topical articles and blog posts.

Page crumbs: Below the resource text on each page, text tells you where you were, what's next (in the outline sequence), and "up," where you can go one level up in the directory structure. You see these navigational crumbs even if you got to the page by searching.

Freshness dating: Most links include a month/year at the end of the annotation. This tells you when the link was last checked by a human. Even if a long time has elapsed, most links will still be good, because they mostly go to major, established, and reliable resources. However, it's also likely that the resource has more than was found at the time of the last visit.

YOU: Please add and discuss resources in your comments. An editor will integrate the resources into the directory based on these comments. The member community can be a strength of the directory.

Why a Directory? Why Use This Directory?

Problems with search engines and unfocused directories: You may not even know about them, but search engines such as Google and Yahoo have a directory structure. These directories only contain a tiny fraction of what's on the web, but that are human-powered listings. But, as of this writing, they have two serious flaws that inspired this directory. 1) Without a specific audience to design for, these scatter resources that seem to belong together among a number of similar or nearly identical topics within a massive database that attempts to embrace all topics on the Internet. 2) With little useful annotation, ODP can still leave you searching and sifting too much. 3) The listings can be affected by politics and profit motive among the various personalities in charge of each category. By the way, the directory that is re-branded and used by some major players is actually known as the The Open Directory Project (ODP).