Colin B. Burke
Colin B. Burke (1936-2024) was an American information historian.
Life
Colin Bradley Burke was born on January 3, 1936. He received a PhD from the University of Washington in St Louis. He was for many years on the faculty of the Department of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Burke was Eugene Garfield Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (later Science History Institute) in Philadelphia in 2000–2001; a Research Fellow at the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations, the Scholar in Residence at the National Security Agency, a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Scholar in Warsaw, 1988-1989. He died on November 6, 2024.
Contributions
Colin Burke published a series of detailed historical studies of higher education, intelligence and espionage, and the development of information services. He specialized in primary sources: archives, interviews, and Freedom of Information requests. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1988-1989.
Publications
Burke's contributions to information history include:
- American collegiate populations: a test of the traditional view. New York: New York University Press, 1982.
- Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex.
- Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. The life Herbert Haviland Field and the Concilium Bibliographicum information service.
- America's Information Wars: The Untold Story of Information Systems in America’s Conflicts and Politics from World War II to the Internet Age.