Evansdale Library at West Virginia University has been a depository since 1991. The Evansdale Library serves Engineering, Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences, Education, Creative Arts and Physical Education. Independent as well as university inventors come to the Evansdale Library for assistance. I continue to work with university departments, WVU’s LaunchLab, the WVU Law School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Law Clinic and the WVU Office of Technology Transfer. Additionally, West Virginia University is bringing together cross campus units interested in assisting innovation and entrepreneurship. The PTRC is a key part of WVU IDEA Hub as the university explores and describes the innovation and entrepreneurship canvas.
This year with the assistance of a student worker we created several posters highlighting inventors including WVU’s first winner (3rd place) of the National Collegiate Inventors Competition, Praveen Kumar Reddy Majjigapu for “Building New Life for Old Structures.”
Through my work with the LaunchLab and the WVU Women’s Business Center, I have participated in entrepreneur pitch contests. I assist inventors connected with the LaunchLab in learning how to search patents. I have also been working with the WVU Davis College (Agricultural) Young Innovators. A team of faculty and outside consultants evaluate the project twice a year and decide on semester allotments.
As the engineering librarian, I continue to work with Freshman Engineering. Part of this contact involves an Intellectual Property module that runs on the Blackboard Platform. This module reaches around 1,000 freshman engineering students.
This Summer I was able to present at the Engineering Libraries Division of the Association of Engineering Education on the topic of patent searching using the CPC: “From Creativity to Classification: A Logical Approach to Patent Searching.” [https://peer.asee.org/28389]
On March 1st we launched a new USPTO Virtual Assistance Program for Pro Se Inventors. While patrons do need to travel to Morgantown, they will be able to speak to an examiner via WebEx. The WVU Libraries and the WVU IDEA hub hopes that this service will enhance this PTRC’s reach to not only WVU Campuses but also across the state of West Virginia, expanding and enhancing people’s knowledge of intellectual property.