Comments on: Letter to the Editor: Many PTDL Librarians Support Fully Indexed Access to all US Patents http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/12/09/letter-to-the-editor-many-ptdl-librarians-support-fully-indexed-access-to-all-us-patents/id=7633/ Patents, Software Patents, Patent Applications & Patent Law Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:58:49 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jim MIller http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/12/09/letter-to-the-editor-many-ptdl-librarians-support-fully-indexed-access-to-all-us-patents/id=7633/#comment-9842 Jim MIller Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:25:37 +0000 http://www.ipwatchdog.com/?p=7633#comment-9842 I need to give credit to Andrew Wohrley, Auburn PTDL Representative and Engineering Librarian at Auburn University Libraries, for writing the first draft of this, and bringing to our attention Gene's October 25 post. He is definitely a co-author of our response. Many thanks, Jim I need to give credit to Andrew Wohrley, Auburn PTDL Representative and Engineering Librarian at
Auburn University Libraries, for writing the first draft of this, and bringing to our attention Gene’s October 25 post. He is definitely a co-author of our response.

Many thanks,

Jim

]]> By: KristinFromIntellogist http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/12/09/letter-to-the-editor-many-ptdl-librarians-support-fully-indexed-access-to-all-us-patents/id=7633/#comment-9833 KristinFromIntellogist Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:57:45 +0000 http://www.ipwatchdog.com/?p=7633#comment-9833 Thank you for this thoughtful post, Jim, and I'm grateful to Gene also for publishing it on IPWatchdog. I couldn't agree more with the points in this blog - patent searching is difficult, and it requires a special skill set that can take months to fully grasp (and years to excel at). One of the things that concerns me is that, even though it's best to learn patent searching from an expert through hands-on training, many people just don't have the time or the resources available to do this. What my company has tried to do through our website, Intellogist (http://www.intellogist.com/), is to create an in-depth resource that attempts to address these challenges and make them clearer to laypeople. For example, we offer a wiki article for Best Practices on patent searching which explains basic concepts such as classification searching (http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/General_Searching_Best_Practices), as well as a wiki Glossary section for definitions of patent information terms (for example, the concept of patent families). To help would-be patent searchers make informed choices about systems, we offer in-depth reports on free and commercial patent search tools, and a comparison table to see their features at a glance (http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Compare:Patent_Search_System). There are a host of other resources on Intellogist as well - we offer resources that can help searchers find coverage information by country, and a resource finder tool to help them discover sources of non-patent prior art in their technical area. Although no web resource could ever equal the full attention and help of a PDTL librarian, I think resources like Intellogist are necessary to educate people about the difficulty inherent in performing a good prior art search. As the prior art searching community looks at the challenges to our profession brought on by increasing numbers of free search resources on the web, one of our biggest responsibilities is to pass on this message. Thank you for this thoughtful post, Jim, and I’m grateful to Gene also for publishing it on IPWatchdog. I couldn’t agree more with the points in this blog – patent searching is difficult, and it requires a special skill set that can take months to fully grasp (and years to excel at).

One of the things that concerns me is that, even though it’s best to learn patent searching from an expert through hands-on training, many people just don’t have the time or the resources available to do this. What my company has tried to do through our website, Intellogist (http://www.intellogist.com/), is to create an in-depth resource that attempts to address these challenges and make them clearer to laypeople. For example, we offer a wiki article for Best Practices on patent searching which explains basic concepts such as classification searching (http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/General_Searching_Best_Practices), as well as a wiki Glossary section for definitions of patent information terms (for example, the concept of patent families). To help would-be patent searchers make informed choices about systems, we offer in-depth reports on free and commercial patent search tools, and a comparison table to see their features at a glance (http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Compare:Patent_Search_System). There are a host of other resources on Intellogist as well – we offer resources that can help searchers find coverage information by country, and a resource finder tool to help them discover sources of non-patent prior art in their technical area.

Although no web resource could ever equal the full attention and help of a PDTL librarian, I think resources like Intellogist are necessary to educate people about the difficulty inherent in performing a good prior art search. As the prior art searching community looks at the challenges to our profession brought on by increasing numbers of free search resources on the web, one of our biggest responsibilities is to pass on this message.

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