The following links are to Websites useful for Communications students and faculty:
Public Relations Society of America: Organization for public relations professionals. PRSA’s primary objectives are to advance the standards of the public relations profession and to provide members with professional development opportunities through continuing education programs, information exchange forums and research projects conducted on the national and local levels.
[the rest of this list is being updated]
Before the Internet became the enormous repository of information that it is, PR professionals needing to find associations/organizations/societies would consult a comprehensive and authoritative print directory called the Encyclopedia of Associations, published by Gale (now Cengage) since 1954.
The Library owned this annually-updated print directory for decades, but cancelled it in 2006. (Note: the Library still has the 2006 (40th) edition in the basement; it is useful for history, but not for current content). The reason for the cancellation was because the print version became too quickly inaccurate, as associations changed. Gale eventually offered the directory as a more-frequently-updated searchable database, but the high-cost was not affordable for the Library.
So, instead of the directory, the following Internet sites provide an alternate way of finding associations/organizations/societies:
- Directory of Associations
- Lists from Google searches (example: Googling “public relations associations” brings up dozens of web lists)
- Wikipedia (despite its non-scholarly status, it is good at compiling lists. For example, this list of newspapers in the U.S.).
- Curlie.org (largest human-edited list of associations, found under subject categories, on the Internet)
- Cause IQ (huge directory of nonprofit organizations, listed by subject and by state)
- O*NET (directory of professional associations, but not social/cultural/etc. associations)