Judy Hickey's REPLY to the Meehanite Metal Company older US patents assignment question leads me to pose a follow-up question. I knew that the Micropatent PatSearch FullText database provides access to the oldest fulltext US collection, back to 1836. I knew that it was created via OCR, so the accuracy of some of the text indexing is less than marvelous, especially the frontpage or bibliographic field indices. Can Micropatent comment on which bibliographic fields have been vetted for this 1836-1971 US backfile? If so, how was this done?
I also noted that Steve Van Dulken responded based on the Esp@cenet server, which points out that some portion of that backfile, at least from 1920-1971, is at least partially available for online searching. I believe much of that backfile bibliographic & patent classification data is also present in Questel-Orbit's PLUSPAT database. So I'd be interested in comments from anyone from the EPO familiar with the Esp@cenet backfile bibliographic/classified data set, or from Questel-Orbit, or from Steve Van Dulken, about the degree of completeness of the bibliographic data available pre-1976, both for US and older non-US patents on Esp@cenet or in PLUSPAT.
This boils down to how complete an answer you can get for how cheap for assignee or inventor or patent class searching? Esp@cenet certains provides outstanding value, since its free, but I'm never sure how complete its data is, nor can one output search results very readily. Micropatent & PLUSPAT are obviously not free, but both provide much improved search engines, reporting & data output capabilities. This particular thread seems like a good time to revisit the old
Why pay if its free on the internet hobby horse?
Roy Zimmermann
Patent Information Specialist
763-505-2527
763-505-2530 (FAX)
roy.zimmermann@medtronic.com
roy_zimmermann@hotmail.com
rzimmerma@aol.com
>>> "Judy Hickey" <jhickey@MICROPAT.COM> 01/22/02 02:44PM >>>
Dear Ms Gorak-Marecik and others interested in older US data:
Searching in our PatSearch FullText database, I find 132 patents mentioning 'meehanite.' All but three of them issued between 1929 and 1973. I can see that some of them are not assigned to the
Meehanite Metal Company (or Corporation), but simply have a mention of Meehanite somewhere in the text. The earliest patent, granted in 1929, is a patent to Augustus Meehan, assigned to the Meehanite
Metal Corporation, and entitled "Method of Heat Treating Iron."
1836-1971 US fulltext data is available as a menu selection when you search in PatSearch Fulltext. Because of the nature of the older text, pinpoint accuracy is not possible for bibliographic fields,
necessitating closer inspection of results to determine where the search term is found in the document. If you would like to know more about the search options for this data, please let me know.
Best regards,
Judy Hickey
Agnieszka Gorak-Marecik wrote:
> Dear PIUG USERS,
>
> I'm looking for American patents of International Meehanite Metal
> Co., granted in the years 1960-1980. In USPTO database I can
> find three of them, but of course I can find only those which are
> granted after 1976. Using the name of asignee I can't find patents
> published in sixties and seventies. I would be very grateful for your
> help.
>
> Agnieszka Gorak-Marecik
>
> University of Mining and Metallurgy
> Main Library
> Department of Special Collecions
>
> Al. Mickiewicza 30
> 30-059 Cracow
> Poland
> tel.: +48 126173217
> e-mail: marecik@bg.agh.edu.pl
>
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