Patents: Learning & Teaching

Patents can provide a wealth of information for people that would like to design an invention they have in mind. You can search to see if the invention already exists or what designs it builds on. This was particularly important for the Senior Engineering Design courses that I was teaching. The professors wanted the students to be able to search databases like IEEE Xplore and Ei Compendex but they also wanted their students to be able to successfully locate patents related to their designs to then write about in their literature reviews before beginning the physical design process.

My starting issue was that I had never actually searched for patents. However, I'm the subject liaison for engineering and went about learning how to use these deliciously unfamiliar databases. No challenge to big! 

To start off with, I went through this PDF tutorial and followed along using the United States Patent and Trademark Office, (USPTO) Patent Full Text and Image Database (PatFT).

Then I watched a video provided by USPTO which teaches you why it's important to search the database using cooperative patent classification (CPC) instead of keywords.

Once I started to feel I was getting a handle on Patents and CPC, I added a patent page to the library guide for the class (I make a library guide for every class I teach).

The page itself provides steps on searching for patents using Google Patents, links to different patent databases, links to patent related organizations, links to helpful tools like the CPC scheme and International Patent Classification (IPC) catchword index, and much more.

If you have any questions on using any of the sites provided or on patents, please feel free to ask. After teaching 3 classes so far, using the IPC catchword index, the CPC scheme page, the USPTO PatFT database, and Google Patents I feel I have a pretty good handle on this.

Top Priorities & Personal Struggles

10 Tips for starting a new job soon after a major surgery and surviving:

1. Be honest with your boss about your needs. 
• (Like going to therapy a few times a week , doctor appointments, or physical limits). 
2. Drink a lot of water & sit with your feet up often.
3. On your day off figure out what you are going to eat all week. 
• (This way you can stick to your restricted diet & save money for medical bills).
4. Crash before work, after work, weekends, etc. 
• (Save the weekend projects, personal education, and just about anything straining for when you have help or further down the road).
5. Ask your family and friends for help.
6. Take 20 minutes a day to actually relax. 
• (Mediation, writing, doing nothing).
7. Take time to get to know your coworkers. 
• (You'll build a good rapport and listening to others can be less draining then other tasks).
8. Take your medication on time!
9. Put a significant amount of energy into pretending you are not exhausted.
• (You want to seem capable and excited at your new job, even if you can't make a great deal of headway into new projects at least show that you are excited about them, people will appreciate the positive vibe). 
• *People also don't want to hear that you are constantly tired or in pain.*
10. Decide on top priorities and then how to stick to them.
• (1: Health, 2: Work, 3: Family; for me this is how I decided where to invest my time. Put my health before work (so I can work) and then gave work whatever I had left, and if I made it through the week with any energy I spent time with my family). 

If you're interested in knowing more I have a further account of my experience below.

About two and half months have passed since beginning my position as a reference & instruction librarian. It's been 16 weeks or almost four months since I had open heart surgery. This presented a number of challenges and opportunities. My job began only five weeks after surgery; at that time, I did not have the energy to do laundry even when someone else was helping or to cook dinner every day. Adding to this I had begun a cardiac therapy program a week before starting this new job which meant exercising an hour three times a week first thing in the morning. On top of the realistic physical and logistical challenges there was a biting anxiety of how to explain to my new boss that my schedule would not be as flexible as it should have been for a young energetic librarian with no dependents to care for.

I once had a teacher tell me that you only have enough time to commit yourself to 3 things. For many years this was school, work, and family/friends. On occasion family/friends got switched out for an internship, karate, other volunteer work, (quite briefly) health, video games, and obsessive book consumption. The day before starting I set my top 3 priorities for the next few months as health, work, and family.

My first day was a wonderful introduction to the staff, the rules, the human resources department, campus environment, and my office. At the end of all the introductions came the dreading part of telling my boss the news about my health. She was surprised by the news, understanding, and accommodating. In fact, most of my coworkers have been quite understanding and accommodating as well. The new job kicked off working around my therapy schedule and I was able to take necessary days off for tests and doctor appointments. The 10 tips provided at the top were how I made it through these past few months to somehow have completed 13 instructional classes, a number of LibGuides (library guides), a little collection development, a lot of reference, and gained the general approval of my coworkers. My position is temporary but if things continue as they have I may find a permanent position here or some excellent recommendations in my future job search.

As positive as that last paragraph was I do want to state that I had days when I just had to put my head down in my office and be exhausted. There were emotional breakdowns from my lack of energy and feeling overwhelmed by tasks. These past few months have been quite difficult and I feel like a different person than I was before my surgery. As my energy levels increase and pain decreases I'm curious to see what I can accomplish moving forward. 

New Instructional Experiences

Great news! I officially graduated library school in May and have started a full-time position as a reference & instruction librarian that I will leave unnamed (my opinions and statements in no way reflect the view of this unnamed university). My past experience at various universities left me adequately prepared for the reference part of my new position. However, I had never had instructional sessions with more than six students in any discipline.

Since starting my new position I've had three (four maybe) instructional sessions so far and feel somewhat positive about them. The first was introducing freshman engineer students to our catalog (Primo) along with journal databases like Academic Search Premier and ScienceDirect. The other two (maybe three) were all senior engineering design courses. The first class had only 12 students (Yay, much easier to teach small groups). The second class had 87 students split into two sessions (eeeep, a lot of students and not a lot of time). So I've done four instructional sessions with three classes.

The session with my freshman and the class of 12 students went pretty well. The students were able to complete activities that involved searching the databases. The seniors were shown IEEE Xplore and Ei Compendex instead of the other databases. These two are better resources for serious engineering searching. The seniors also had an activity that involved finding patents through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Google Patents. My entire experience with learning and then teach patent classification and searching has shown me it is messy, the databases could be better, and as when using journal databases -- you need to try more than one to find everything you need.

My large classes ended up having 48 students and 36 students in them. We covered patent classification, patent searching, IEEE Xplore, Ei Compendex, and Knovel. All in about 40 to 45 minutes; each group was in a different session (not with the library) before or after my session. If this sounds overwhelming that's because it was for the students. Each of the students had to complete an activity that involved locating patent classifications and actual patents, so I was able to have them actively learning through searching on their own. However, given the lack of time I devoted about 30 minutes to demonstrating the patent related searching and then when there was about 10 to 15 minutes lefts demonstrated the three databases.

My hope is that they remember where to locate the databases and how important appropriate keyword searches are for them. I would rather have 1 hour 30 minutes for these sessions in the future. In the feedback forms I was given for these sessions, instead of telling me what was least useful, quite a few students said they wished we had gone slower but understood we had time constraints that prevented this.