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May 2-7 2009 – Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) 2008 Annual Conference, Hyatt Regency, San Antonio TX |
The
annual PIUG business meeting was held on Sunday, May 3rd. It was a standard
business meeting that included approval of minutes from the previous
meeting, a treasurer’s report, reports from each committee, and a call for
new business and announcements.
Cynthia Yang presented a progress report on the five-year strategic plan that was adopted at last year’s meeting. Progress included the establishment of the PIUG Wiki, a membership task force, an executive director search task force, and an education and training task force. A significant amount of progress has been made on each of these fronts.
The membership task force has established proposals to restructure membership requirements for PIUG, and the offices and duties that vendor members are allowed to hold. There will no longer be a class of “vendor” members, giving current vendor members full rights as PIUG members. Bylaws will be updated accordingly and amendments will be voted on at next year’s meeting.
In follow-up to last year’s discussion about hiring an executive director to manage PIUG business, PIUG has instead selected an “association management organization” to manage these affairs. TEI was selected and recommended to the board of directors, who in turn approved and began contract negotiations with TEI. A contract was agreed upon and TEI was hired just in time for the conference.
The PIUG Education and Training Taskforce consists of three workgroups: Education, Certification, and Mentoring. Considerable work has been done by members of these three workgroups, but each is still in need of further volunteers to carry out the various duties.
Members voted on one change in the bylaws which allowed for some executive decisions to be made by electronic mail voting.
The Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) is an independent, non-profit research organization whose goal is to bring cutting-edge IR technology to the patent search industry, with a primary focus on professional information retrieval needs.
Current IRF research includes multilingualism, IR of chemical patents, environmentally friendly search and data processing, and evaluation of performance of retrieval systems at finding patents.
With my background in information systems and organization, and my experience with working with patent information, this session truly spoke out to me and made me want to become more involved in this type of work. I spoke with Tait after the session about how to get involved and he agreed to send me more information about the IRF program. He also recommended that I contact a professor at Amherst College (or maybe UMass Amherst) about graduate studies in the field of Patent IR.
Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire is the only law school in the nation that has a program focused on Intellectual property and patent searching. FPLC offers a Master of IP for non-lawyers degree (MIP) and a Diploma of IP for non-lawyers (DIP) which is presumably similar to a certificate of studies beyond the bachelor’s degree but not equivalent with a master’s degree. The DIP program is developed for non-legal professionals who wish to learn basics of IP law to further their skills and carry out IP-related but non-legal work for their firms. Librarians are included in this group.
John Cavicchi himself is a librarian and a non-lawyer who has developed a suite of IP searching courses and programs for lawyers and non-lawyers at FPLC. He heads the Pierce Law Intellectual Property Library, perhaps the best library in the nation for conducing IP research due to the massive amount subscription databases held on site.
Cavicchi mentioned in his presentation that FPLC be considered as a possible home for patent professional certification training once PIUG and other groups have finalize the examination requirements – see workgroup meeting highlights below.
There exists a large learning curve for non-chemists who wish to conduct chemical patent searching. These include the use of multiple and ambiguous names of chemicals, and missing names – because chemists think in structures, not names. Therefore, chemical structure searching is more suitable and likely to retrieve more accurate results than searching by chemical names or other keywords.
This session focused on very basic chemical structure diagrams and a free tool for searching for them within patent documents. The tool demonstrated was Surechem, (http://www.surechem.org), a gateway for chemical patent searching of the full-text collections of the USPTO, EPO and WIPO – totaling more than 9 million unique chemical compounds.
SureChem includes drawing tools for drawing angles and line segments, double and triple bonds, and for adding atoms. Also included are comparison and confirmation tools to validate your structure diagrams.
For library practitioners with no knowledge of chemistry, SureChem is pretty useless. One still needs to know basic chemistry principles and language, and how to read a structure diagram. It is impossible to learn about chemical structure searching in the course of a 30 minute technical session at a conference. The best advice is to take some chemistry courses.
John Cavicchi from Franklin Pierce Law Center is interested in establishing FPLC as the training program of choice for patent analyst certification. Although he did not attend our dinner meeting, Lucy Akers was able to discuss this with him over lunch and report to us at the meeting. This will be discussed more thoroughly on the PIUG Certification Workgroup wiki and may become a central part of our workgroup’s focus.
Prior to the conference, our workgroup compiled a list of recommendations and responses to the PDG certification proposal, and just before the meeting, PDG offered its response to us. The general consensus regarding the PDG response to our response to their certification proposal is that we should go along with their proposal. PDG (and in a way, CEPIUG) are far ahead of us in their efforts and they seem to be ready to move on. The biggest (and really the only real) conflict between us and them is that they do not want the multi-tiered examination/certification schema that we suggested. If we can get on board with their proposal for now, we may be able to re-visit the idea of multiple tiers later down the line, even if it is independent of PDG/CEPIUG.
I presented our workgroup’s annual report at the meeting. Lucy and I decided to post the report in the Certification WG wiki instead of the public or general membership space, because it includes information from PDG that they do not want available for public consumption.
This being my 4th PIUG conference, I come away with an idea for a future project. It would be helpful to have a map of patent services, for example, data providers, aggregators, product and database vendors, translation services, etc. This would be an organized way to visualize and identify what company is doing what in the patent universe.
I am also now interested in pursuing a 2nd masters or even a PhD in information systems specifically focused on IP and patents. I’ve had this interest in one form or another, but due to the Information Retrieval Facility and FPLC technical sessions described above, they now seem more concrete and plausible. I now see others focusing in those areas who may provide resources for pursuing the goal. It would be best if an online program existed, or something here at UMaine that offered night and weekend courses, but unfortunately none does.
I want to find out which institutions (colleges, universities, law schools) offer the best resources for conducting patent research – which has the best collection of patent-specific databases and other finding aids. John Tate from IRF recommended I check Amherst College (or maybe it was UMass Amherst) and it seems like FPLC may be even better.
For more information, contact:
Martin Wallace
Science and Engineering Center
Patent and Trademark Depository
Raymond H. Fogler Library
Orono, Maine 04469-5729
Phone: 207-581-1678
Last Updated by: Martin Wallace: 06/12/2009
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