In collaboration with the PTDLP Office at USPTO, Georgia Tech PTDL held a free “Patents and Trademarks 101” Workshop (http://libguides.gatech.edu/patentsworkshop) on campus in November 2010. This full-day workshop brought together about 120 enthusiastic participants, including inventors, students, faculty, researchers, librarians, business owners, and IP professionals both on campus and throughout the state. Tom Turner, Librarian from the PTDLP Office, helped with the planning of our workshop. Dr. Michael Hydorn and Ms. Hope Slonim of USPTO traveled to our campus and offered sessions on patents and trademarks and answered questions from the audience. We also had a “Local Resources Panel” that included experts from the Inventors Association of Georgia, the Georgia Small Business Development Center, as well as the National Association of Patent Practitioners. The participants were very pleased with this training opportunity and expressed an interest in seeing more such events in the future.
We assisted about 200 inventors and researchers with individual appointments and with quick instructions, and offered two Intellectual Property in Academia Seminar series in the library. We also taught several course-integrated patent related classes to graduate and undergraduate students. Since Fall 2010, several IP related research guides have been created using LibGuides, which generated about 7,000 uses.
The Library is undergoing major organizational changes. With the Combined Service Desk coming soon and integrating the brand new Undergraduate Learning Commons building into the Library, we are embracing new opportunities for campus wide collaboration and innovation. We are working together to make sure that the PTDL at Georgia Tech continues to offer value-added services and training to inventors, students and researchers.