Public Records Division/Public Information Services Division
Public User’s Meeting
June 21, 2006
2:00 p.m. - Remsen Building Conference Center

The Public User's Meeting was held at 2:00 p.m. in the 1st floor conference room (1D04/1D14) of the Remsen Building on the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia. Amanda Putnam, Acting Manager for PRD, chaired the meeting. There were approximately 4 members of the public in attendance and 7 USPTO staff.

Announcements - Public Search Facilities (PSF)

• PSF will be open on Monday July 3rd, but closed on the Federal Holiday of Tuesday, July 4th.

PSF Updates

There will be more tours coming through the PSF in the near future. Efforts are being made to keep the noise levels down during the tours and disruption to the searchers to a minimum.

A user stated that the surroundings appear to magnify sounds instead of promoting quiet and suggested raising the height of the workstation cubicles. This suggestion has been made on a number of previous occasions. The height of the cubicles was purposely designed to provide sight lines for staff and will not be changed.

Network problems caused some disruption of service with Employee Locator and Public PAIR on Monday, June 19. The problem was resolved.

Question: Why is it when users leave workstations and return, it takes the workstation so long to come back up? Also when searching a particular statement it takes the workstation so long to process. A user lost all his previous information and the system would not let him log out.

Response: This question has been forwarded to the UPWS technical team, but this is a good opportunity to remind the public that incidents such as these need to be reported immediately and with specific information provided. USPTO investigation of problems is hampered without information specific to workstation, time, and description of event.

Question: Why isn't the PSF staff more familiar with how DERWENT operates?

Response: Expertise for foreign patent searching is provided by STIC. While the PSF staff is being trained on DERWENT by STIC staff in order to be conversant in its vocabulary, the continuity of expertise will continue to reside in STIC, not in Public Search Facilities where the focus is US patents, not foreign patents.

Question: Has the duplication factor been eliminated with OCR?

Response: Not yet. That is a requirement that has been included in a future release of the patent search systems.

PRD Updates

Suitland facility file wrapper issue: The first meeting to discuss the timeliness problem was earlier today. There will be more to come on this situation in the near future.

Question: Are forms for ordering certifications being updated?

Response: No.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:00pm.

Next meeting date is July 19, 2006, in the Remsen Conference center room 1D04/1D14.