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Patent and Trademark Search Room
and Depository Libraries
Provided for public use by the USPTO.
The Information Center of the United States Patent and
Trademark Office located at 1C35 Madison West, 600 Dulany
Street, Alexandria, VA, has available for public use over
120,000 volumes of scientific and technical books in various
languages, about 90,000 bound volumes of periodicals devoted
to science and technology, the official journals of 77
foreign patent organizations, and over 40 million foreign
patents on paper, microfilm, microfiche, and CD-ROM.
The Patent Search Room located at Madison East, First
Floor, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA, is where the
public may search and examine U.S. patents granted since
1790 using state of the art computer workstations. A complete
patent backfile in numeric sequence is available on microfilm
or in optical disc format. Official Gazettes, Annual Indexes
(of Inventors), the Manual of Classification and its subject
matter index, and other search aids are available in various
formats. Patent assignment records of transactions affecting
the ownership of patents, microfilmed deeds, and indexes
are also available.
Many inventors attempt to make their own search of the
prior patents and publications before applying for a patent.
This may be done in the Patent Search Room of the USPTO,
and in libraries, located throughout the United States,
which have been designated as Patent and Trademark Depository
Libraries (PTDLs). An inventor may make a preliminary
search through the U.S. patents and publications to discover
if the particular invention or one similar to it has been
shown in the prior patent. An inventor may also employ
patent attorneys or agents to perform the preliminary
search. This search may not be as complete as that made
by the USPTO during the examination of an application,
but only serves, as its name indicates, a preliminary
purpose. For this reason, the patent examiner may, and
often does, reject claims in an application on the basis
of prior patents or publications not found in the preliminary
search.
Those who cannot come to the Patent Search Room may
order from the USPTO copies of lists of original patents
or of cross-referenced patents contained in the subclasses
comprising the field of search, or may inspect and obtain
copies of the patents at a Patent and Trademark Depository
Library. The PTDLs receive current issues of U.S. patents
and maintain collections of earlier issued patent and
trademark information. The scope of these collections
varies from library to library, ranging from patents of
only recent years to all or most of the patents issued
since 1790.
These patent collections are open to public use. Each
of the PTDLs, in addition, offers the publications of
the U.S. Patent Classification System (e.g., Manual of
Classification, Index to the U.S. Patent Classification
System, Classification Definitions, etc.) and other patent
documents and forms, and provides technical staff assistance
in their use to aid the public in gaining effective access
to information contained in patents.
With various files, it permits the effective identification
of appropriate classifications to search, provides numbers
of patents assigned to a classification to facilitate
finding the patents in a numerical file of patents, provides
the current classification(s) of all patents, permits
word searching on classification titles, and on abstracts,
and provides certain bibliographic information on more
recently issued patents.
It is advised to contact the library, in advance, about
its collection, services, and hours. For a complete list
of PTDLs, refer to the USPTO website at www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/ptdl/.
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