College Park PTRC is based in the University of Maryland STEM Library, formerly the Engineering Library, which combined with the Charles E White Chemistry Library in 2018. Jim Miller has been PTRC Rep since 1998, after our founding Rep Judy Erickson, retired. I am sorry to report that Judy died July 18, 2020, but a few of the EPSL “Old Guard” were fortunate to join her for a reunion lunch in late 2019, before the pandemic. STEM Head Nevenka Zdravkovska continues to coordinate our Plant Patents Color image site (lib.umd.edu/plantpatents) with Digital Services. Our grad assistant Eliza Scally is working on the site, along with UMD’s Geospatial Librarian Milan Budhathoki, who has made a visualization of Plant Patent titles, inventors, companies, and locations – now in beta at:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/05fe8e0e86ad4a0f9a757ad76f8b654b/ . The final version awaits the load of 17,000+ Plant Patent color images. Jim is working on incomplete metadata for nearly 3000 of these records. Our Engineering Librarian Sarah Over is a first time attendee at Seminar 42, and a business librarian or 2 may also stop in. COVID has had fairly limited impact on our patent and trademark assistance, because we have mainly done one-on-one in recent years.
We rely very heavily on free public databases – mainly by email and phone. A very helpful patron from NIH made a chart of patent and application numbers that she said “feel free to share” –
USpatentWithNumbersExplained-AnnHohmann061020drft.pdf