Online before the Internet: Early Pioneers Tell Their Stories, Part 9: The Federal Government's Role

Since June 2003, Searcher has published interviews with four pioneers who were instrumental in the development of early commercial online systems (Carlos Cuadra, SDC;Roger Summit, Dialog; Richard Giering, LexisNexis; and Jan Egeland, BRS). In this segment, we feature Melvin S. Day, often mentioned by the pioneers in this series as a champion and facilitator of new technologies that appeared throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Day began his government information career in 1946 at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. As documents from the Manhattan Project were declassified, he was responsible for their indexing, creating what later was known as Nuclear Science Abstracts. Mr. Day went on to managerial positions at other major government agencies, among them NASA, National Science Foundation, National Library of Medicine, and National Technical Information Service, which in turn were influential in the development of early online systems.