The Patent and Trademark Resource Center at Purdue University, West Lafayette has expanded its instructional potential with the addition of David Zwicky, the new Chemical Information Specialist and Assistant Professor of Library Science in late September. In October and November, David joined Charlotte Erdmann, Purdue’s PTRC Representative, in preparing and presenting three 90 minute workshops for students who participated in the local Soybean Competition.
Purdue also acquired a subscription to the Derwent Innovations Database and is using it as a part of its education programs. Soy presentations emphasized using U.S. Classification, Cooperative Classification, and International Classification to search USPTO public databases, PubEAST, Espacenet, and Derwent. Charlotte and David also tutored student competition groups in conducting their patent searches.
Expanded opportunities have also permitted Charlotte to do three sessions with a Nuclear Engineering Design class and work more closely with a Biomedical Engineering Design class. She also received a funded grant from Purdue University for the data mining software called VantagePoint. Charlotte and David look forward to using VantagePoint to analyze patent and bibliographic searches.
David is presently teaching a semester-long course in Chemical Literature which covers the breadth of the chemical information landscape. As a part of the course, he is teaching two sessions on patent searching, emphasizing CPC classification searching in Espacenet and USPTO public databases and Markush structure searching in SciFinder and Derwent.