Paperless patents? Linda Hall Library thinks not

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Brianne Pfannenstiel

Linda Hall Library

Brianne Pfannenstiel

Reporter- Kansas City Business Journal

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As a product of the digital age, I've been conditioned to believe that anything worth saving is worth saving to an external hard drive.

Paper can be ripped, lost, swept away, spilled on or destroyed in any number of ways. For me, digital has always been the way preserve information for the future.

Luckily, the folks at Linda Hall Library in Kansas City aren't quite so naïve.

The library, one of 84 Patent and Trademark Resource Centers throughout the country, is home to a record of every patent ever filed in the United States. Although the staff is working to digitize those records, library President Lisa Browar said they'll never go paperless.

"With the proliferation of digital information, there's this conception that everything is available online, and if it's not, it's probably not worth looking for anyway," Browar said. "And I think we all buy in to that to a certain point. But one of the reasons we made the determination to remain a print library was because nobody knows exactly how long digital information will survive as a format."

That was surprising to me. But think about it: In 1996, BusinessWeek estimated, 5 billion floppy disks were in use at the time. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a computer that can read them.

In just the past 20 years, we've had the floppy disk, the compact disk, the flash drive, the external hard drive and, today, the cloud. Good luck predicting how digital information will be stored 20 years from now.

"We know that paper stored under the right conditions can last 500 years, maybe longer," Browar said. "But nobody knows about digital technology, as an information storage medium."

Brianne covers legal affairs, health care, life sciences, animal health and biosciences.