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.

Instructional project reflection

We were able to quickly decide on a topic suggested by Latrece, teaching seniors how to sign up for and use Facebook. Her and I both had personal experience assisting older member of our family with signing up recently and felt this would be useful for seniors while being focused on using social media. I think the most difficult part for us in constructing this lesson was trying to find a way to have our pretend seniors follow along on a computer. Given almost everyone in the class already had a Facebook, no one would be able to start a new one because it is linked to phone numbers and email addresses. We didn't want this to be a lecture for our classmates. We felt that keeping people engaged would happen by having them participate in the signup process.

The easiest part of the design process was actually coming up with what we wanted to go over. We wanted our learners to have a Facebook with a profile picture, be able to find friends, and be able to post messages by the end of our lesson. We just came up with the exact steps to do this. I feel that the class was engaged in the lesson even though it was material they did not need. Everyone played their roles very well and brought up legitimate issues seniors would encounter during our lesson; such as profile picture problems, not knowing which keys are which, and concerns about privacy and information. I was surprised at how fast the time went and how easy it felt to actually go through the lesson plan. It did not feel like a presentation which was nice, I tend to be very nervous when presenting something. Teaching feels much more calm to me. 

To check out our lesson plan click here.

Database tutorial reflection

For my database tutorial I decided to use Choice Reviews Online as the database I would go over. During my reference and user services course as a new library student I had a great deal of trouble with a collection development assignment because I was unaware of collection development tools available at the time. During my employment as a reference assistant at the Crown Library I have used this database on multiple collection development projects my supervisors have given me. I showed the viewer how to get to the database and how to do a search on the database for material.

When we were told about this project I immediately decided to use a screen capture software I have called Snagit. I had used the screencasting part of it once and to me it seemed like it would make this very simple. It was easy enough to record the video and after a few hiccups I got the audio to record as I made the video so that I didn't need to use an external program like audacity. However, after the video had been captured  I discovered that Snagit does not allow users to impose shapes or texts on top of the video despite allowing this on images you edit. It also has no video editing components to it. This was highly disappointing given how simple it would be to enable it. From here I tried out a video editing software called VideoPad that was available for free. While I was able to add text on top of my video it did not allow shapes of any kind and quickly became of no use to me. I wanted to be able to circle what I wanted the user to click but this was not an option. While Snagit will remain in my professional toolbox it was disappointing to discover its limitations.

Snagit would be simple to teach to others. You just select the frame size of the screen (you can exclude the url box and other parts of the desktop), click on the microphone to enable audio, and click record to make your video. Given the lack of video editing capabilities the user will need to record over again if they want to eliminate mistakes.

Pathfinder reflection

For my pathfinder I chose to focus on Latin American and Latino studies. Being Puerto Rican, I have a personal interest in this subject and a few months ago I created a LibGuide for the Rebecca Crown Library covering some resources for this subject. Given I had a list of all the resources and summaries of what was available in them already written down it seemed like it would be easier to create a pathfinder out of that material. When creating the pathfinder I tried looking at some of the other curation links like blendspace, educlipper, and feedly briefly but those seemed either to focused on creating actual lesson plans instead of research resources or to brief, not allowing for a proper description of a resource.

I ended up using Livebinders.com which was suggested in class last week. At first it seemed like is was too messy visually for me when we were given it as an example. It felt cluttered and a little hectic in my mind. After using it however, I feel like it was a great way to organize information. I didn't plan on having sub-tabs but after adding in some of the websites resources to the binder it seemed like the most logical thing to do. The fact that users can actually use the website within the Livebinder page was a nice feature that I think adds to how valuable this is as a tool. It was easy to change the layout of a tab, its color, and its place among the other tabs. Deleting an unnecessary tab was also simple and I didn't need to look up any instructional videos on how to use Livebinder despite this being my first experience with it. The only issue I had with it was that even after selecting an option or changing a setting the pop up window for that particular feature stays open till you close it. To me it would make sense for it to return you to the main page automatically after you click on an option. Livebinders will be added to my professional toolkit in the future. It will be great when creating pathfinders for patrons and fellow staff members alike.

Click here to open this binder in a new window.

Digital Storytelling Reflection

The most enjoyable part of this process was the interaction with my group members while creating it. We had a lot of fun locating images to put into the movie, deciding on a script, and convincing each other to try and perform the role. We laughed a great deal and it did not feel like we were doing actual work. The most difficult parts were technical issues (not being able to find the record button or separating audio) and we usually had to seek out help to resolve these issues. Even though the three of us had a little experience with iMovie, we still had to learn new things to be able to create our project. We even learned how to record audio in garage band and import it into iMovie prior to learning the shortcut to make the audio record button visible. 

This project would be great when trying to promote library evens or services to the community. We could make the video and have it published to the library page, email the link out to subscribing members of our newsletter, and try to have teachers play the videos for students/parents during orientations or weekly announcements. This project provides a great opportunity to teach kids not only how to produce media content but also what they are allowed to put within their content and how copyright laws work. They can have fun making the videos but also learn how to locate images, music, and other material that are licensed under creative commons. Within the library this medium can also be used to create book reviews that might help promote reading among other students.