At the Minneapolis Central library we continued to assist Minnesota inventors, small business owners and entrepreneurs in 2014. In addition to my monthly “patent talk” we once again partnered with LegalCORPS to offer Traps & Pitfalls in Intellectual Property and Writing & Filing a Provisional Patent Application several times throughout the year.
On November 17th we were one of six PTRCs to host the Detroit Regional Roadshow, focusing largely on the AIA trials. About 50 people attended.
For a few years now my colleague Andrea Stelljes and I have been doing a presentation at our History Day Hullabaloos, highlighting the Government Documents and Patent/Trademark collections as a good place to get primary sources for their projects. One student mentioned he was reporting on Walt Disney. Happily I knew Disney had a patent on animation (1940). The student and his mom were thrilled with that information.
One of our Teen librarians asked if I could come up with some weird or unusual patents that would get teens attention and show them the wide variety of inventions that can be patented. That was a fun task.
It’s nice to be able to use our extensive collection and IP knowledge for other things in addition to patent searching.