This book narrates the development of science and intelligence information systems and technologies in the U.S. from World War II through today. The story ranges from a description of the information systems and machines of the 1940s to the rise of a huge international science information industry, and to the 1990's Open Access-Open Culture.

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 Stalin
Chapter 1 The OSS' Unusual Librarians
Chapter 2 Forging an Intelligence System
Chapter 3 A New Information Culture
Chapter 4 Microfilm at the OSS, for War and Profit
Chapter 5 One System for All Intelligence
Chapter 6 CIA's Classification and Automation Battles
Part Two: Cold War Information Politics and Lives
Chapter 7 Ideology and Science Information Policy
Chapter 8 The CIA's Librarians Under Fire
Chapter 9 Library and Classification Revolutions? SAL, Semantic Factors, the Luhn Scanner
Chapter 10 Automation Dreams, Minicard
Chapter 11 The CIA vs. the Librarians
Chapter 12 From Microfilm to Computers
Chapter 13 Automatic Translation's Woes
Chapter 14 A Cold War Information Career
Part Three: Information's Troubled Golden Age to the Era of Open Access
Chapter 15 Sputnik's New Politics of Information
Chapter 16 An American Information Century?
Chapter 17 The Plural Information System Survives, With Difficulty
Chapter 18 A New Information Era: The American Information Century's Challengers
Chapter 19 Another Serials Crisis, Open Access, the Return of Ideology