Although the collection includes documentation of all aspects of Burch's career and scientific activity, the coverage is uneven and sometimes regrettably scanty. This is in part attributable to Burch's temperament and preferred way of working. His early life (academic upbringing, public school and Cambridge) might suggest a conventional establishment figure, yet he was in fact a 'loner,' working idiosyncratic hours and holding research posts or personal appointments largely independent of departmental structures and bureaucracies. In addition, his career was subject to abrupt changes of direction, often for personal reasons of which the best documented was his decision to leave the Metropolitan-Vickers Company after the distressing death of his brother Francis in 1933. The changes were rarely permanent however, and Burch often returned to a research topic (e.g. optics) after a break. He was himself aware of psychological complications in his life, sometimes attempting to describe them more or less obscurely but generally preferring to look forward with new ideas for continuing research, as he did to the very end of his life. The drawbacks of such a personality and career pattern are the lack of administrative discipline in dating or paginating notes and drafts, and Burch's failure to maintain correspondence files in favor of using the backs of letters--even those in current use--for notes. There are thus serious gaps in all sections of the documentation, and problems in assigning more than tentative dates or descriptions to much of the technical material.

The papers contain biographical and personal material, notably records of other members of Burch's family including his father, George James Burch, Professor of Physics at Reading University, 1882-1909, and his brother, Francis Parry Burch who worked with him at Metropolitan-Vickers. There is substantial research material relating to his university-based work in optics and mineral dressing and his late medical interests, especially vitamin B-group therapy and inositol. Almost all the surviving material from the Metropolitan-Vickers period relates to the work of Francis Parry Burch. There are conference talks and lectures, 1932-1981 and some publications material. The surviving correspondence is not extensive though there is one relatively substantial sequence of letters of aspects of mineral dressing and mining.