Baltimore, MD

We’ve had an extremely quiet year, so I don’t have a whole lot to report. Our public patrons have had mostly mechanical inventions based on a need they noticed while going about their own routines. One of our professors has developed an interest in trademarks, so I’ve gotten more experience doing trademark searching. I find it more challenging than patent searching because you really have to analyze an image and can’t rely as much on keyword searching. Every year we have a class of Johns Hopkins medical engineering students do prior art searching for inventions they’ve developed in their lab class. The sheer ingenuity of their work is amazing, and it’s interesting to see how different their search process is compared to the simpler inventions of our typical patrons.