Established in 1993, the Orono, Maine PTDL is located at the Raymond H. Fogler Library’s Science & Engineering Center at the University of Maine.
Established in 1993, the Orono, Maine PTDL is located at the Raymond H. Fogler Library’s Science & Engineering Center at the University of Maine. I have been the sole PTDL representative since August 2006, assisting patrons from both the University and from around the state. This has been the busiest year for the Orono PTDL since I came here nearly six years ago.
The University’s Innovation Engineering program continues to grow; as a result I assist an increasing number of students with their prior art searches, a requirement for one of the courses in the program. Besides having more students from the Innovation Engineering program visiting the Library, I also collaborate with the program faculty, teaching classes on patent searching and intellectual property in general, along with other IP experts.
The Orono PTDL has acquired a license to the new patent search and analysis tool, CobaltIP. CobaltIP is an integrated suite of search and analysis tools for researching USPTO, EPO, WIPO, and JPO patents. It has far more features than I can list here so I encourage all PTDL representatives to check out CobaltIP’s offerings at their website: https://www.cobaltip.com/content/compare-cobalt-editions.php. My institution purchased the Silver Edition, and we received a 50% academic discount!
A unique feature of CobaltIP is the ability to set up private accounts for any number of users. This benefits the patron in two significant ways: first, the user can login from home so there is no need to come to the PTDL for access. Second, the user can create private research folders and search alerts and to save their search history and results.
Unfortunately, only one user may access the “seat” at a time. We only have one seat, but more may be purchased if the need and funding were to materialize. While commercial use is not permitted with our license, it did permit me to set up the University’s technology commercialization office with an account, and the word has spread about its ease of use and innovative features. I now have eight users in the system, two faculty and the rest students, after only two months of the service being offered.
Other PTDLA involvement this year has been to add PDF versions of each downloadable document to the PTDLA website. Now all documents are downloaded as PDFs instead of their less-accessible Microsoft equivalents.
Submitted by:
Martin Wallace, Librarian
Science & Engineering Center
Raymond H. Fogler Library
University of Maine
Orono, ME 04469
207-581-1678
fax: 207-581-1653
[email protected]
http://www.library.umaine.edu/staff/wallace.htm