UCI Patent Library Urged After Losses in L.A. Library Fire
The Los Angeles Central Library fire, which destroyed one of the four patent collections in California, has triggered a move to establish an official U.S. patent library at UC Irvine.
Since the fire, UCI officials said, they have received many inquiries about patents. That has spurred a campaign by the university and local patent attorneys to raise $150,000 for a new library, which would be the 62nd in the nation.
Because the April 29 fire charred $500,000 worth of patents and viewing equipment, lawyers, inventors and others in Los Angeles and Orange counties who need to research patents have had to order copies from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Washington or use the state’s other patent libraries in Sacramento, Sunnyvale and San Diego.
Local supporters of a patent library in Irvine say that in addition to making patent searches more convenient for Orange County corporations and lawyers, it would enhance the area’s image as a big-league technology center.
“It would be an advantage to the business-scientific community, sort of like the Sunnyvale patent library in the Silicon Valley near Stanford,” said Joe Price, a Newport Beach patent attorney.
Because of the pressing need to establish another patent library in Southern California as quickly as possible, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has assured UCI that it will process the application “on an emergency basis” as soon as it receives a formal request.
Microfilm Purchase Given Priority
But Stephen Christensen, UCI’s development director for special projects, said Thursday that the university first wants to raise the money to buy microfilms of U.S. patents for the last 20 years--about 1.5 million documents--as well as the terminal readers and printers needed to tap a computerized data base. Christensen said the university, with help from the Orange County Patent Law Assn., which has a membership of about 90 patent lawyers in the county, hopes to collect the money through donations or commitments in the next three months. A patent library could open to the public before the end of the year, he added.
Current plans, Christensen said, are to house the patent collection in a 400-square-foot area next to the government publications section in the basement of UCI’s main library.
He said the university also is considering an Irvine Co. suggestion that a larger patent library could be placed in a 100,000-square-foot “innovation center” for high technology, start-up companies that the company plans to build next to the campus.
Officials at both the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Los Angeles Public Library stressed, however, that plans will go ahead to replace the patent collection in Los Angeles by the time the city’s Central Library reopens at temporary quarters early next year. “There is plenty of room for two patent libraries in the area,” said Billie M. Connor, who is in charge of the Los Angeles depository. She cited a burgeoning demand for researching patents.
300,313 Requests for Patent Information
In the 1985 fiscal year, she said, the Los Angeles patent library received 300,313 requests for patent information, almost double the requests of the year before. A survey in August of 1983 showed that 81% of the people using the patent library were from Los Angeles County, 13.8% were from San Diego and Orange counties, and 5.2% were from “elsewhere.”
Connor said that when Los Angeles County’s patent library reopens, it will be much more extensive than the one proposed in Irvine, including about 4.5 million patents going back to the first issued in 1790 and signed by George Washington. That patent, she said, was for potash and pearl ash used for making fertilizer and soap.
