Houston, TX

The most significant and sad news from Rice University’s PTRC is the loss of department head Esther Crawford on January 18, 2014 after a long illness. Esther was an amazing, supportive, and innovative boss who was not afraid to try new things herself while encouraging and supporting others to do likewise. Known for her sunny personality, Esther was also incredibly intelligent but never condescending. Her leadership, support, and friendship will be sorely missed at Rice and in the all the organizations to which she gave her time and talents.

Esther was professionally active in ALA, GODORT, TRAIL, LOCKSS and PTRCA, serving tirelessly as an officer and/or committee member. Most recently she was advertising editor of DttP and the PTRCA webmaster. Esther will be honored by the USPTO at the spring seminar and by ALA’s GODORT at the ALA annual conference this summer.

Even while she was sick Esther was devoted to making sure the department remained effective in its day-to-day operations. Linda Spiro and Siu Min Yu have continued to offer monthly beginning patent search classes for Houston-area inventors and a bimonthly foreign search class. We have a self-directed PubWest PowerPoint loaded on our public patent computers and a handout providing a basic orientation to searching PubEast. The public has also come to our facility for some one-on-one Trademark searching help. We look forward to improving our classes with materials from the March seminar.