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.