The PTRC at Fondren Library, Rice University once again had an exceedingly busy year with our own classes and events and those offered at Rice by the USPTO.
In May Michael Hydorn and Daphne Joseph from the PTRC Program at the USPTO visited for three days offering patent and trademark searching training to both our staff and the public. The May 19 day-long well-attended event open to the public also included speakers from area invention-related enterprises: the Houston Inventors Association; the Houston Technology Center; South Texas College of Law Pro Bono Programs in both Trademarks and Patents; the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program; and the University of Houston Small Business Development Center.
On September 16 Craig Morris, Managing Attorney for Trademark Educational Outreach at the USPTO presented Trademark Basics to attendees from the library, campus, other area universities and community colleges, and area entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial organizations.
Rice PTRC events began on August 5 with a joint campus-wide celebration of the debut of Rice patents in the repository (https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/79705) and the 225th anniversary of the first U.S. patent with a special invention to Rice inventors. After sending the invitation, we noticed an immediate spike in the patent repository’s usage statistics so even those who could not attend learned that it existed. Particularly useful in the repository is a keyword search of the patents’ full text. The process of adding patents to the repository was devised by a team of librarians including Siu Min Yu and Linda Spiro, Government Information Librarians; Scott Carlson, Metadata Coordinator; Monica Rivero, Digital Curation Coordinator; Kathy Weimer, Head, Kelley Center for Government Information, Data and Geospatial Services; Lisa Spiro, Executive Director of Digital Scholarship Services; and Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Scholarly Communications Liaison. A description of the process is available from an article co-written by Linda Spiro and Scott Carlson, “Collecting and Describing University-Generated Patents in an Institutional Repository: A Case Study from Rice University,” Code4Lib, issue 30 (Oct. 2015), http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10981.
Siu Min Yu and Linda Spiro continue to alternate offering monthly beginning patent search classes to area inventors. Siu is also experimenting with scheduled trademark search classes and Linda continues to offer an extension to the basic patent search class.
Linda went to the South Texas College of Law (STCL) in both August and January to teach basic search techniques to law school students in the patent pro bono program headed by Kevin Jones. Kathy Weimer, Head of the Kelley Center for Government Information, Data and Geospatial Services also attended the January session.
Siu and Linda also judged at the Young Inventors Association contests at area elementary schools and Linda judged at the finals at the University of Houston in May.