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Abstract

Beginning in 2016, patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted to Oklahoma State University were included in SHAREOK (https://shareok.org/.). The joint institutional repository for the Oklahoma State University Libraries (OSU) and the University of Oklahoma Libraries (OU), SHAREOK serves as the home for the intellectual output of both communities and will ultimately include digital dissertations, faculty publications, digital special collections, open access publications, and open educational resources. Including patents has increased the depth of the collection and allows them to be searched or indexed by date, author, title, and subject/classification. Using DSpace software, the contents of SHAREOK are crawled by Google, also the Library’s online catalog. Identifying patents by assignee or owner can only be done comprehensively using the Advanced Search feature in the USPTO’s Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) for issued patents or the Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT) for pending patents or patent applications. In-house tools at the USPTO including PubWEST may also be used for comprehensive research. The following article gives an overview of patents as intellectual property and outlines the value of patents in the institutional repository, the process to identify the patents issued to Oklahoma State University over time, and the creation of the metadata structures to house the data in DSpace. Similar projects were accomplished at Clemson and Rice Universities. With various practices and software at each institution, there are no best practices at this time. Each project offers insights as to the possible ways of accomplishing similar results.

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