Evans Library Archives and the Radiation Inc. Collection — Melbourne, Florida

The John H. Evans Library on the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne holds the Harry P. Weber University Archives and Special Collections. The archives page describes two roles: documenting the history of the Florida Institute of Technology and its impact on the community, and keeping research collections. The Special Collections holds several large research collections covering subject areas such as flight, poetry, ocean engineering, space, and related industries, and those collections include records, artifacts, photographs and audiovisual material.

For Melbourne history, the most important holding is the Radiation Inc. Archives, the papers and objects of the electronics company that grew up at the Melbourne Airport in the 1950s and 1960s. Around it sit collections on a Space Coast congressman, a Florida poet laureate, a flight simulation pioneer and an Army missile general. Together they make the Evans Library one of the few places where the engineering decades of South Brevard are kept in original documents rather than retold secondhand.

The library is older than its building. Gordon Patterson's 2020 history of Evans Library for Florida Tech places its start in May 1961, four months after University of Melbourne trustees had transferred ownership of the 35-acre campus on Country Club Road to Brevard Engineering College. Eileen Hall, a Georgia transplant and former journalist, appointed herself librarian before the college had a single full-time employee, and kept the Tech Library open on weeknights between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Her first shelves held runs of The Physical Review and The IEEE Review given by Irving Wolff, the RCA research director who had inspected the college in June 1959.

An accreditation consultant told the college in 1963 that it needed a real library building. The first one, the William August Bartholomae Library, was dedicated Jan. 23, 1965; it was a two-story building with space for 40,000 books and study space for 250 students. The pledge that was meant to pay for it never arrived, Florida Tech sued for breach of promise in 1967, and the Bartholomae name came off the facade. Melbourne residents Florence 'Flossie' Evans and her husband, John, led the effort to retire the loans. Flossie Evans became Florida Tech's first female trustee in 1973.

The present building came from a citrus grove. In 1980, John Evans announced plans to sell his 144-acre Melbourne citrus grove to the DeBartolo Corp., which intended a mall on the site, and to give the $5 million from the sale to a new library dedicated to his wife and his mother. On Jan. 24, 1985, the four-story, 66,500-square-foot building was dedicated. John Evans died before it was finished. Hall remained university librarian until 1972 and wrote monthly columns on the library in the Melbourne Times.

The Radiation Inc. Archives in the Evans Library digital collections open with the company's origin: Homer Denius and George Shaw founded Radiation Inc. in 1950, and its engineers worked on PCM telemetry, satellite earth stations, spacecraft electronics and reconnaissance systems. The online collection lists 782 items, many of them short profiles of Melbourne engineers and the programs they worked on, from Minuteman and Titan missiles to the Nimbus satellites and Apollo and Saturn data systems. The same page says the company had grown to 5,000 employees by 1967, when Harris Corporation acquired it.

The physical papers are described in ArchivesSpace. The Radiation, Inc. Small Collections finding aid (collection SC-RAD010) records that the company was first located in an old Naval building at the Melbourne Airport and later added facilities in Palm Bay and Orlando. It gives a different headcount at the merger, over 3,000 employees in 1967, so the two Florida Tech descriptions do not agree on the figure. The collection spans c.1950 to 2016 and fills 2.51 cubic feet in 7 boxes, plus 4.97 gigabytes of digital media on 4 discs.

Much of SC-RAD010 came from former employees. Starting in 1996, the Radiation Old Timers held reunions in Melbourne, and families of members later donated documents, photographs, video and three-dimensional objects, arranged in 16 series by surname. Photographs show Radiation's overseas installations in the United Kingdom, Germany, Guam and Asmara, Eritrea. Five related collections sit alongside it: the Frank A. Perkins Papers (SC-RAD006), Jamie Cox Papers (SC-RAD007), Nancye Meyers Papers (SC-RAD008), A. B. Amis Papers (SC-RAD009) and Ray Penn Papers (SC-RAD011). The finding aid notes that the series are expected to keep growing with new donations.

The ArchivesSpace collection list for Florida Tech Special Collections shows 9 processed collections. Six of them relate to Radiation Inc.; the other three are the Congressman Dave Weldon M.D. Papers (1995 to 2008), the Edmund Skellings Papers (1932 to 2015) and the Edwin A. and Marion C. Link Papers (1884 to 2018). The Evans Library digital collections add the General John Bruce Medaris collection and the Scott J. Frisch collection on Apollo, Saturn, Titan and Skylab work.

Each has a Space Coast link. The digital collections overview states that Dave Weldon represented the Space Coast in Florida's 15th District for seven terms from 1995 to 2008, and that Edwin A. Link is known as the Father of Flight Simulation and built submersibles for underwater archaeology. The collection browser notes that Edmund Skellings held a lifetime appointment as Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 until his death in 2012, and Medaris directed the first successful United States space program. For Melbourne researchers, the Weldon papers cover federal space and defense issues during the years after the Harris era, while the Link and Skellings papers show Florida Tech's reach beyond engineering.

Not in person at the moment. As checked on October 8, 2026, the Florida Tech archives page states that the Archives are currently closed due to a staffing transition, and that staff cannot assist with research requests or accept donations at this time. The same page lists the usual walk-in hours as 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday with an appointment strongly recommended, and gives the reading room contact as 307 Evans Library at 150 West University Boulevard in Melbourne.

The digital side stays open. The Evans Library digital collections, built on the Omeka platform, present selected items online for education and research, and the ArchivesSpace finding aids describe what is in each box of the Radiation papers. Use of the physical material comes with conditions: the SC-RAD010 finding aid says some records are restricted for privacy and institutional policy, and that publishing any item needs written permission from both the Harry P. Weber University Archives and the original copyright holder. Melbourne researchers working on the Radiation years can therefore read the finding aids and digitized profiles now and plan box-level research for when Florida Tech reopens the archive.