Colin B. Burke is an historian who has researched and published on the history of higher education, quantitative methods in history, American political history, the history of computers, the history of information, the history of nonprofit organizations, and intelligence history.Among his honors, he has been the Eugene Garfield Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a Research Fellow at the Yale PONPO Center, the Scholar in Residence at the National Security Agency, a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Scholar in Warsaw during the year when Poland ousted the Communists.

Part One: Information at War with Hitler and Tojo, Then with StalinChapter 1 The OSS¿ Unusual LibrariansChapter 2 Forging an Intelligence SystemChapter 3 A New Information CultureChapter 4 Microfilm at the OSS, for War and ProfitChapter 5 One System for All IntelligenceChapter 6 CIA¿s Classification and Automation BattlesPart Two: Cold War Information Politics and LivesChapter 7 Ideology and Science Information PolicyChapter 8 The CIA¿s Librarians Under FireChapter 9 Library and Classification Revolutions? SAL, Semantic Factors, the Luhn ScannerChapter 10 Automation Dreams, MinicardChapter 11 The CIA vs. the LibrariansChapter 12 From Microfilm to ComputersChapter 13 Automatic Translation¿s WoesChapter 14 A Cold War Information CareerPart Three: Information¿s Troubled Golden Age to the Era of Open AccessChapter 15 Sputnik¿s New Politics of InformationChapter 16 An American Information Century?Chapter 17 The Plural Information System Survives, With DifficultyChapter 18 A New Information Era: The American Information Century¿s ChallengersChapter 19 Another Serials Crisis, Open Access, the Return of Ideology

This book narrates the development of science, sci/tech, and intelligence information systems and technologies in the United States from the beginning of World War II to the second decade of our century. The story ranges from a description of the information systems and machines of the 1940s created at Wild Bill Donovan's predecessors of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the rise of a huge international science information industry, and to the 1990's Open Access-Open Culture reformers' reactions to the commercialization of science information. Necessarily, there is much about the people, cultures, and politics that shaped the methods, systems, machines and protests. The reason for that is simple: The histories of technologies and methods are human histories. Science information's many lives were shaped by idiosyncrasies and chance, as well as by social, economic, political and technical `forces'. The varied motives, personalities and beliefs of unique and extraordinary people fashioned science information's past. The important players ranged from a gentleman scholar who led the Office of Strategic Services' information work, to an ill-fated Hollywood movie director, to life-mavericks like the science information legend Eugene Garfield, to international financial wheeler-dealers such as Robert Maxwell, and to youthful ultra-liberal ideologically-driven Silicon Valley internet millionaires. However, although there are no determining laws of information history, social, political, legal and economic factors were important. After 1940, science information's tools and policies, as well as America's universities, were being molded by the nation's wealth, its role in international affairs, the stand-off between left and right politics, and by the intensifying conflict between Soviet and Western interests.