The Evansdale Library at West Virginia University in Morgantown serves not only our campus with engineers, agriculturists, and designers, but also health professionals, business students, scientists, young entrepreneurs from WVU as well as inventors and entrepreneurs throughout the State of West Virginia. The PTRC (begun in 1991) is a key part of WVU’s IDEA Hub which encompasses WVU’s services to entrepreneurs and innovators who are students, faculty, and citizens of West Virginia. Through this Hub I receive referrals from the WVU LaunchLab, the WVU Law School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Law Clinic, and the Women’s Business Center.
As an engineering librarian, I continue to work with Freshman Engineering. An Intellectual Property module that runs on the Blackboard Platform reaches around 1,000 freshman engineering students. I continue to provide IP instruction to Horticulture, Law, and Biomedical Engineering. This year I provided a two hour lecture to a graduate level genetics course.
This fall we hosted a Trademark Symposium and bought in Craig Morris as the keynote speaker.
Some recent WVU initiatives which I have been involved in include the Evansdale Innovation Center and the recently introduced NSF i-Corps program. I attended the fall and spring cohort meetings and offered library services to participants.
Through my work with the LaunchLab and the WVU Women’s Business Center, I have participated in entrepreneur pitch contests. I assist inventors connected with the LaunchLab in learning how to search patents. This past year our IDEAHub had a campus-wide Demo Day, and I encouraged my National Collegiate Inventor to participate and he won $1,000. I also served as a judge for the WVU Davis College (Agricultural) Young Innovators during Demo Day.
In March 2019 we had our first participant in the USPTO Virtual Assistance Program for Pro Se Inventors. We hope to see continued participation in this program.
