Intellectual Property Resources from the British Library: Business & IP Centre

One of my favorite patent search blogs is (perfectly) titled The Patent Search Blog: Steve van Dulken’s blog on patents and IP. The blog includes useful insights about various patent search systems, commentary on interesting and humorous patent documents, and reports on important statistics, events, and topics in the intellectual property field.  Steve van Dulken has been working for the British Library since 1974, and his blog prominently links to the  Business & IP Centre section of the British Library website.  The Business & IP Centre features detailed lists of databases and publications on business information, IP information, and industry guides that may be useful to patent searchers in identifying new prior art resources.  The site also includes a calender of interesting workshops and events (as well as videos of past events, for users who can’t attend live presentations in London).

Read on as we take a quick tour of the databases, publications, and workshops listed on the  Business & IP Centre website!

Free Online Sources of Historical Scientific Journals and Documents

Usually when prior art searchers need to find historical scientific documents, they’ll have to locate a library or archive that has a copy of the manuscript.  Sometimes though, digital collections of historic scientific documents are available through paid online database like INSPEC, which has journal articles dating back to the 19^th century, or digital collections that are freely available online.  One collection that recently made the news is the Royal Society journal archive, which  became freely accessible to the public as of October 2011.  According to an article in the Guardian:

The Royal Society, established in 1660, began publishing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society — world’s first scientific journal — in March 1665. In 1886, it was divided into two journals, Philosophical Transactions A (mathematics, physics and engineering) and Philosophical Transactions B (biological sciences), both of which are published to this day. Its historical archives are defined as all scientific papers published 70 years or longer ago. These historical archives include more than 60,000 scientific papers.

Another source of free scientific historical documents is the US Library of Congress, which hosts dozens of digital collections of historic documents, photographs, and other media relating to science, technology, and business on the Library of Congress website.

The Royal Society archive offers open access to a historic scientific journal, while the Library of Congress website provides free access to dozens of digital collections covering a wide range of scientific topics from a variety of eras. Read on to explore the contents of the Royal Society Journal Archive and the Library of Congress Digital Collections in Science, Technology & Business!

The Wonderful Free Resources of the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the United States’ most well known and extensive library, as well as the research library of the United States Congress. As such, it’s a great resource to find physical copies of obscure and hard to find books (and other materials). You aren’t allowed to check out books from the LOC, but the public is allowed to use the collections after obtaining a user card.

Today we’ll profile a few of the available resources that searchers can take advantage of to leverage this vast store of knowledge. We’ll talk about finding scientific guides and technological resources for your prior art search, and going beyond the Library of Congress to allow you to search hundreds of libraries across the world simultaneously!