referencebooks

Encyclopedia of Communication and Information

Edited by Jorge Reina Schement

Published by Macmillan Reference, 2001

This encyclopedia is in three 8.5" by 11" volumes and runs to a total of 1161 pages including the lengthy index, plus a preferatory section. The book is printed in larger type.

Like most other Macmillan reference books, this is a useful and fairly comprehensive but less than heavyweight work intended for a wide audience of students and researchers. Communication Studies, Media Studies, and Information Studies are the domains covered by this interdisciplinary work. Twenty different academic disciplines and professions are mentioned in the preface as being related to the subject of the encyclopedia.

This encyclopedia has 280 entries in an alphabetical arrangement. The preface identifies eight categories into which these entries fall. They are:

1. Careers (e.g. journalist, librarian, publicist)
   
2. Information science (e.g. human-computer interaction, information storage and retrieval)
   
3. Information technologies (e.g. broadband, the Internet, radio)
   
4. Literacy (e.g. computer literacy, media literacy)
   
5. Institutional studies (e.g. elections, information society, law, media history)
   
6. Interpersonal communication (e.g. groups, relationships, rhetoric)
   
7. Library science (e.g. cataloging, text-based literacy)
   
8. Media effects (e.g. advertising, opinion formation)
   

For a better idea of what's covered, here is the full list of entries in the "M" sequence, which has more entries than most of the alphabetic sequences:

• Machlup, Fritz
  
• Magazine Industry
  
• Magazine Industry, Careers in
  
• Magazine Industry, History of
  
• Magazine Industry, Production Process of
  
• Management Information Systems
  
• Marconi, Guglielmo
  
• Marketing Research, Careers in
  
• McLuhan, Herbert Marshall
  
• Mead, George Herbert
  
• Méliès, George
  
• Mills, C. Wright
  
• Minorities and the Media
  
• Models of Communication
  
• Mood Effects and Media Exposure
  
• Moore, Anne Carroll
  
• Morse, Samuel F. B.
  
• Murrow, Edward R.
  
• Museums
  
• Music, Popular
  

Entries are typically a couple of pages in length. The writing is clear but not as in-depth as one might like.

It is interesting to see a reference book that brings together these disciplines (media and communication studies, information studies) in this way. My feeling is that it is such a broad domain covering so much knowledge that either a much bigger encyclopedia (in the range of ten volumes or more) or a more narrowly focused encyclopedia is really in order. The problem with this one is that it gives noticeably shallow coverage in attempting to serve people in a number of disciplines. In bringing this information together in place, though, it does make an interesting argument for a disciplinary grouping of knowledge.

This is an interesting reference book but not as useful as it ought to be on account of its relative lack of depth.

The Encyclopedia of Propaganda

Edited by Robert Cole.

Published by Sharpe Reference, 1998.

This is a three volume set running to a total of 961 pages including the bibliography, plus nineteen pages of preferatory material and a twenty-three page index. The books measure 8" by 9.5".

The "Publisher's Note" begins: "This three-volume Encyclopedia of Propaganda offers 510 alphabetically ordered essays that cover the historical, political, sociological, cultural, and artistic aspects of the phenomenon of propaganda." Included are articles on artistic and literary issues; on books, films, songs, and artworks; on business and economics; on education and language; on government; on health and medicine; on historical events and eras; on media and journalism; on nations; on organizations; on ethnic movements; on individuals; on religion; and on general concepts in propaganda.

Articles about individuals tend to be about propagandists, political figures who used some propaganda, and theorists of propaganda. Political and social issues are discussed in terms of how propaganda has been used to influence people's opinions about them. Those two kinds of articles make up most of the book.

The articles range in length from single paragraphs to about three pages. The longer articles are generally signed by the contributor, and the shorter ones not. Entries begin with a brief sentence in italics defining the word before going on to discuss its meaning. The prose is clear, and the authors make a concerted effort to approach their topics as objectively as they can. The articles contain much useful information, including both general background and information having to do with propaganda. In fact, simply in the course of browsing I found some references to authors on an obscure topic that I've been wanting to read up on for a while (19th century Jewish anti-Zionism).

For a better sense of what's included, here is the full list of entries in the "E" sequence (one of the briefer sequences):

• Economic propaganda
  
• Education as a propaganda rationale
  
• Education as a propaganda tool
  
• Egypt
  
• El Salvador
  
• Ellul, Jacques
  
• Empire Marketing Board
  
• Equal Rights Amendment campaign
  
• Esperanto
  
• Espionage
  
• Ethics
  
• Ethiopia: Italian invasion
  
• Evangelists
  

I have to point out one major but very predictable flaw, and that is that commercial propaganda, today called advertising and public relations, is not given nearly the level of attention it warrants. There are entries for advertising, public relations, Edward Bernays, and a few other related topics, but these are few relative to amount of commercial propaganda to which we are constantly exposed. When the public relations industry was founded, the term "public relations" hadn't been invented yet, and practitioners called themselves propagandists, which is what they were and are. They themselves introduced and won acceptance for the term "public relations" after the word "propaganda" picked up a degree of negative connotation after World War II. That contemporary discussions of propaganda follow this linguistic change and mostly leave out public relations (and what I think this book should include are numerous discussions of specific PR firms, campaigns, and techniques) represents a massive victory for the industry. This is because it allows them to go about their work mostly invisibly, as our education in propaganda teaches us to be suspicious of political messages but not of the messages originating from PR firms, which are mostly perceived as entertainment and news.

That problem aside, it's a useful and informative resource.

Newsletters In Print, 12th Edition: 2000. Jeff Sumner, editor.
Published by The Gale Group, 1999.

This 1276 page, single-volume hardbound directory covers more than
11,200 newsletters, included based on criteria given right up front:
they are published serially, in the US and Canada, available to the
public, of a national or broad regional interest, and tend to treat
specialized interests and topics.

The book is divided into a sections as follows:

Descriptive listings of the newsletters, three columns to a page, with
each listing numbered and taking up about two column inches of space.
The listings include contact information, information on who the
editors are, a description of the newsletter of a couple of sentences,
notes on illustrations, audience, size, date started, frequency of
publication, circulation, price, ISSN (where available). This section
is itself divided into 33 sections by subject areas, which themselves
are grouped into seven broad categories: Business and Industry, Family
and Everyday Life, Information and Communications, Agriculture and Life
Sciences, Community and World Affairs, Science and Technology, and
Liberal Arts.

Following those descriptions are the indexes.

The first index is for Online Newsletters. (That section is hopelessly
out of date.) Following that is the index of Free Newsletters. Then
the Index to Newsletters with Advertising, useful if you want to
advertise something to a specialized readership. Then there are the
Publisher Index, the Subject Index, and the Title and Keyword Index.

This is a great resource with the one major weakness that it covers an
area of information that changes so quickly it's difficult to keep up
with in a resource that's only updated every few years.

Dictionary of Media Literacy

By Art Silverblatt and Ellen M. Enright Eliceiri, eds.

Published by Greenwood Press, 1997.

This is a 6" X 9.5" hardbound book of 234 pages including the index and contributors' bios.

As the preface states, "The Dictionary of Media Literacy is a compilation of significant concepts, issues, organizations, people, and international developments in the field of media literacy."

The entries fall into two major categories, which are not separated: concepts and groups and individuals. The majority of the entries seem to fall into the category of groups and individuals, with numerous small, local initiatives described, as well as academics working in the field in various places around the world (the international scope is worth noting).

A sampling of the individuals included are Henk Hoekstra of the International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisuals, Denise Newfield of the Department of English at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Manuel Pinto, a former journalist who now teaches Media Eduation at the Teacher Training Center of Minho University in Braga, Portugal, each of whom is described in a paragraph or two.

The entries for concepts are often the longer entries, but not always. "Pleasure Perspective" is given a short paragraph, but it finishes with See Also references to Affective Response Analysis, Autobiographical Analysis Approach, and Identification Analysis. A sampling of other concepts and topics explained are Discourse Analysis, Communications Ecology, Narratology, Jolts, and Intertextuality.

The work represents an impressive collection of information, but seems to suffer a little from a limited vision of the scope of the discipline of media literacy. For example, there is no entry in the book for George Lakoff or for his conceptualization of the concept of framing. Admittedly, in 1997 Lakoff had not yet emerged as a popularizer of concepts useful in media literacy thinking, nor, perhaps, is he as important a thinker as many consider him to be, but by 1997 he had begun to apply his ideas from linguistics and cognitive science to questions of public rhetoric and media. The Dictionary would probably benefit from a somewhat wider scope, so that useful ideas from socio-linguistics could be included.