Utah’s PTRC is located at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The PTRC representative is Alfred Mowdood, who became the rep after Dave Morrison retired in 2017. Tallie Casucci also helps the PTRC efforts. The Marriott Library has been a PDL and now PTRC since 1984.
With the pandemic lock-down, we moved all our teaching materials into online formats for both synchronous and asynchronous classes. We continue to meet with individuals and small groups across the state with Zoom. We created educational modules about patents and intellectual property with case studies and hands-on practice for the Office of Vice President for Research’s Research Education program. We’ve reused this content for other synchronous and asynchronous sessions with engineering and business students. We have an online course which inventors can use, which we’re advertising via our Marriott Library Online One-Stop Resource. This One-Stop Resource is a Canvas course, which is open to everyone (Canvas is our learning management system). Outside of campus, we met with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) in Logan, UT. They’re creating educational modules with checklists for small businesses and start-ups. We continue to work with teams in the Bench-2-Bedside (B2B) Competition, an state-wide cross-disciplinary medical device competition. We worked with several winning teams in the B2B 2020 Competition.
Finally, we continued our research project with David Irvin, NM’s PTRC representative, about intellectual property protection among federally recognized tribes in the 4-corner states. We hope to create an IP roadshow and help with economic development initiatives during the pandemic economic recovery. We’ll present on this research at the upcoming Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference.