Colin B. Burke
Colin B. Burke (1936-2024) was an American information historian.
Life
Colin Bradley Burke was born on January 3, 1936. After graduating from San Francisco State College (later San Francisco State University), he spent nearly twenty years as a professional musician. He received a PhD from the University of Washington in St Louis in 1973 with a dissertation on American colleges and their students, 1800-1860. He was for many years on the faculty of the Department of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he turned his attention to the early history of digital computing.
Burke was a Fulbright Scholar in Warsaw, 1988-1989; Scholar in Residence at the National Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History, 1991-1992; Eugene Garfield Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (later Science History Institute) in Philadelphia, 2000–2001; a Research Fellow at the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations; and Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. He died on November 6, 2024.
Contributions
Colin Burke published a series of detailed historical studies of higher education, intelligence and espionage, computing, and the development of information services. He specialized in primary sources: archives, interviews, and Freedom of Information requests.
Publications
Burke wrote widely on the history of higher education, intelligence and espionage, cryptanalysis, computing, and information services. Numerous publications are listed in Google Scholar. [1]
Publications relating to information history include:
- C-Span Intervew (recording): Allied vs. German Cryptology.
- "History of information science." Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. 41 (2007): 3-53. [2]
- Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
- "A rough road to the information highway. Project INTREX: A view from the CLR archives." Information Processing and Management 32 (1996): 19-32.
- "The Ford Foundation's Search for an American Library Laboratory." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no 3 (2002): 56-74.
- "Thanks, Prof. Rayward, for Explaining..." Library Trends 62, no 2 (Fall 2013): 293-301. Commentary on the nature of information history. [3]
- Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. A biography of Herbert Haviland Field and the Concilium Bibliographicum information service.
- "Herbert Haviland Field (1868-1921): Bibliographer of Zoology." With M. K. Buckland. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology 42, no 6 (August/September 2016): 10-14. [4]
- "Precise Zoological Information: The Concilium Bibliographicum, 1895-1940." With M. K. Buckland. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology 42, no 6 (August/September 2016): 15- 19. [5]
- America's Information Wars: The Untold Story of Information Systems in America’s Conflicts and Politics from World War II to the Internet Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Awards
- American Society for Information Science & Technology. Best Information Science Book Award, 2019.
Further reading
- Obituary, primarily family photos. Dignity Memorial. [6]
Papers
Unpublished material is available on his website. [7]