Early Pioneers Tell Their Stories

Abstract

This article presents an interview with Jan Egeland, co-founder of Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS). BRS is a commercial system that grew out of the Biomedical Communication Network (BCN) BRS was the first commercial online service to have the MEDLINE database. The whole history of BRS was medical. The real pioneer in all of online was Irwin Pizer at the State University of New York Medical Center, a librarian. Pizer knew that an online Index Medicus was happening and he wanted to get in on it. For his own library, he wanted some way of providing the same kind of access to important monographic information. So, in 1968, he put together a project called the SUNY Biomedical communication Network that was funded by New York state. Egeland was first involved in SUNY in 1966 as an indexer of monographic literature. The intent at BCN was a library-based service only. In the medical library environment, people struggled through Index Medicus indexed system, and they had to go to the reference librarian for help. With BRS later on, it quickly became clear that there were applications for end users in the nonprofessional environment, the nonlibrary environment, and the home environment.