U.S. Patent Office moves data online

Information Management Journal, May/Jun 2003 by Swartz, Nikki

Patents become public information in exchange for a 20-year monopoly on an invention. But patent records must be kept available forever. Each year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office receives 340,000 patent applications, some of which are millions of printed pages long. It must cope with 30 million gigabytes of data, an amount that continues to rise steadily. In each of the past five years, the agency's storage needs have grown between 25 and 40 percent. That kind of volume requires a lot of file cabinets.

To better handle its ever-increasing document load, the agency has undertaken a two-year, $40-million project to make all the documents that accompany the patent applications process Web-accessible by October 1, 2004. The latest stage in this mammoth project is the addition of a storage-attached network (SAN) to let the office manage the growing need for storing and retrieving many terabytes of documents and drawings. In a deal with network storage vendor EMC, the agency will pay only for the storage services it uses. The $45,000-perterabyte price tag includes storage equipment plus network switches and engineering services designed to help the agency better manage its resources and achieve higher availability and better disaster recovery.

The move online saves time and money for inventors because it makes the document-based discussion with patent examiners easily accessible to those who can't visit the Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, Virginia. So far, the agency has posted to the Web its patent and trademark records from 1790 to the present.