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Reports on a mailed questionnaire survey of corporate managers and executives from fields other than communication and public relations (accounting, administration, engineering, legal, operations, marketing, etc.) in four major corporations. Analysis included frequency and mean tests plus factor analysis. Results suggest these managers and executives consider the public relations function to be significantly important to their organization. However, most of those surveyed do not know what the public relations function in their organization is or does. Respondents (n = 423) ranked external communication activities to be considerably more important than internal communication. Technical public relations skills were also considered more necessary than public relations management abilities. Few thought corporate communication or public relations people needed to be involved in strategic planning or organizational decision making.

This paper reports on personal and telephone interviews with senior‐level corporate managers and executives from fields other than public relations and communications (administration, engineering, finance and accounting, human resources, legal, marketing, sales and production) in three corporations. This qualitative study (n = 61) is a follow‐up to the author's earlier quantitative postal questionnaire survey of a similar group of subjects (n = 423). All interview participants were subjects in the quantitative research. The results add additional evidence to the author's previous findings suggesting that corporate executives from other fields do not understand the corporate communications or public relations functions. As was the case in the quantitative research, subjects interviewed in this qualitative study considered external communications — especially media relations — to be the most important task that their organisation's public relations professionals were responsible for. Technical public relations skills were considered more necessary than communications management abilities for public relations professionals. The findings also suggest that the public relations function needs to do a better job of being accountable by establishing metrics to measure the effectiveness of communications efforts. Public relations also needs to be managed in such a way that it will help organisations better to achieve business goals, especially those of the new global economy.

This paper explores how corporate communications and public relations were affected by the 11th September, 2001 terrorism attacks on the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the history and development of public relations education in the USA and Canada.

The research methodology used for this paper is the historical/critical analysis approach.

This paper finds more differences than similarities between public relations educational development in the two countries. The first PR course at a US university was taught at the University of Illinois in 1920 and the first US degree program was offered by Boston University in 1947. The first Canadian university PR course was taught at McGill University n 1948 and the first university degree was offered by Mount Saint Vincent University in 1977. Although PR courses and degrees are offered at a small number of élite US universities, the greatest recent PR curriculum development has been at smaller, second‐ or third‐tier institutions. While a few Canadian universities offer courses and degree programs in the field, most of Canada's recent PR program growth has been at colleges rather than at universities.

Rightly or wrongly, academic institutions often look to North America for direction when it comes to establishing and developing public relations education programs. A number of factual inaccuracies about public relations education history have frequently surfaced in books and journal articles. This paper corrects a number of those inaccuracies and in doing so improves public relations scholarship.

A thorough review of the literature suggests that this paper represents the only journal‐length piece about the history and development of public relations education in Canada and the USA.

In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a pre‐specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured representations called templates. Here we describe the nature of the IE task, review the history of the area from its origins in AI work in the 1960s and 70s till the present, discuss the techniques being used to carry out the task, describe application areas where IE systems are or are about to be at work, and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing the area. What emerges is a picture of an exciting new text processing technology with a host of new applications, both on its own and in conjunction with other technologies, such as information retrieval, machine translation and data mining.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).