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 in Columbia, Maryland.

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's publications 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. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
• It wasn't all magic: The early struggle to automate cryptanalysis, 1930s-1960s. [Fort George G. Meade, MD] : Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002. [1]
• The secret in Building 26 : the untold story of America's war against the U-boat Enigma codes. With Jim DeBrosse. 2004.
• 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. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Awards

• American Society for Information Science & Technology. Best Information Science Book Award, 2019.

Further reading

• Obituary, many family photos. [2]

Papers

Unpublished material is available on his website. [3]