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Licensing a trademark in many firms, if it occurs at all, is an incidental ad hoc arrangement. An unorganized approach can mean trouble. It can also mean the firm is losing an opportunity to exploit fully a valuable asset. Tom Meyer, Cathie Tinney, and Terry Tinney argue that trademark licensing is deserving of careful attention and planning.

BOOKSDavid I? Rest, ed. The Fourth Resource: Information and Its Management Aldershot, England: Ashgate, I996 I 8 I pages; $54.95This is a collection of important papers from British specialists that stakes out some fresh thinking about the role and management of information.The fourth resource in question is information, equal in importance to the other three: people, capital, and physical resources. Getting that idea accepted is apparently further along in Europe, where information management (IM) is better established as an important business process than it is in the United States. IM is defined as "effective production, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information in any format and on any medium to support business objectives." The best companies, argues Best, have certain measures in place regarding IM: policies that determine ownership, standards to assure effective communication, procedures, and a technology strategy. It is also necessary to bridge the functional divisions among information technology specialists, librarians, publishing specialists, and other practitioners in the field.Among the most important selections are Elizabeth Orna's treatise on valuing information and Clive Holtham's effort to "resolve the imbalance" between technology and information. Information technology does not assure strategic advantage, regardless of the scope of the investment; a new information professional is called for to adequately exploit the new system. Orna thoughtfully outlines the need to transfer information into knowledge because hoarding destroys the value of the information, proper diffusion and use create its true value. The difficulty of relating this problem to that of assigning market value is also explored most usefully here. -JWM

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