The records consist of minutes, financial records, publications, correspondence, and other documents of the National Public Relations Council (NPRC), arranged in five series: incorporation documents, board and committee minutes, financial records, membership communications, and publications and project files.
Historically social work sought to interpret the character and needs of disadvantaged clients to funding and policy-making authorities. The NPRC collection reflects this communication function as transformed by the emerging discipline of public relations. A major portion of council activities were directed toward increasing private philanthropy to health and social-service agencies. In this regard, the collection complements other State Historical Society holdings in the fields of mass communications and philanthropy.
The most significant source within the collection is the BOARD AND COMMITTEE MINUTES, which serve as a capsule barometer of shifting technical and policy-making concerns. Typically the minutes contain not only proceedings of meetings, but also agenda, budgets and financial statements, committee reports, and planning documents. Mimeographed board-member manuals (1941-1974) also filed here provide even briefer summaries of council objectives over a thirty-year period. FINANCIAL RECORDS consists of loose material which supplements the information in the minutes.
Another indicator of council activity and interests, programs of membership institutes, 1960-1976, which are arranged as part of MEMBERSHIP COMMUNICATIONS, reflect prevailing publicity concerns during the council's final years. Additional membership material include the microfilmed News Bulletins, 1923-1936, which served as a forum for discussing promotional activities mounted by welfare agencies across the nation. Gaps in the files occur for bulletins 11-20 (1925-1926), 32 (1928), and 57-72 (1931-1933). Bound volumes of bulletins 100-112 (1936-1938) and its successor, Channels (1938-1983), are available at the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library.
Individual PUBLICATIONS AND PROJECT FILES, which are arranged chronologically, are disappointingly fragmentary as are records of other membership communications and information on the decisions leading to merger with PRSA.
