The PTRC at the University of Nevada, Reno continued to offer services throughout 2020, virtually from mid-March to June and both virtually and in-person, following all facial covering and social distancing protocols, from July through the end of the year. We currently have one PTRC librarian (Tara Radniecki) but will likely pull the business librarian back into the fold once such a hire has been made.
During this unprecedented year, our consultation numbers dropped substantially but we continued to provide information and services as we and our users navigated this new environment. We assisted community members looking to create new business opportunities, recent alumni just getting their feet wet in entrepreneurship, and researchers looking for historical information.
Our library makerspace continued to bring in new users creating novel intellectual property from both the campus and the greater community. In recent years, we have also begun incorporating intellectual property into our makerspace instruction sessions as we expand our maker competencies program, embedding transdisciplinary and transferrable skills into a wide variety of courses. You can learn more about maker competencies here: https://library.uta.edu/makerliteracies/competencies (Number 14 is related to intellectual property.)
Finally, as most of our users could not come to campus, we focused our outreach efforts on social media. A revamped social media plan resulted in a renewed engagement among our Facebook and Instagram followers and we often shared online learning opportunities from the USPTO and incorporated patent and trademark related information into our monthly themes.