Howdy from the Texas A&M University West Campus (Business) Library, home of the College Station, Texas PTRC since December 22, 1983. I, Jared Hoppenfeld, along with assistance from library staff member Boyd Conerway, are happy to assist students, faculty, and community members with their P&T questions.
We recently celebrated our 35th anniversary of being a PTRC by welcoming Spruce Fraser and Neil Massong to present at our day-long Patent and Trademark Day, an event that was open to the public and well-attended, followed by a half-day of staff training.
After having heard and read about successes at Clemson and Rice, this past year, I decided to pursue the creation of a Texas A&M University Patent Collection within our institutional repository, OAKTrust. A collaborative effort, I have been working with our Scholarly Communications Department as well as Cataloging and Metadata Librarians, and we are close to going live with this online collection.
This year, we used intellectual property as fun ways to promote not only the business library but the entire Library System! Following the example of Paulina Borrego at UMass Amherst, one of our librarians created a coloring book to be used at outreach events, full of images of patents that are either relevant/owned by Texas A&M University or to the resources we make available in our Libraries (such as laptops, headphones, and digital cameras). At our main Libraries Open House event, the business library hosted a game where students were asked to put trademark images for the same company in chronological order. Examples included Apple, Texas A&M, and Nike.
