September 24, 2004
#04-25

Press Release, 04-25

Patent and Trademark Public Search Facility To Open at Agency’s New Headquarters

PRESS RELEASE

Final phase of agency’s move to consolidated headquarters begins

The final phase of the Department of Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) move to its new headquarters in Alexandria, VA, begins this weekend with the relocation of the public search room. The patent public search facilities and the trademark search library will open on Monday, September 27. The new public search facility will occupy the first two floors of the Madison East Building located at 600 Dulany Street. It will consolidate current patent and trademark information sources and staff and focus on electronic delivery of information. The state-of-the-art facility will offer 300 computer workstations providing access to the full complement of USPTO patent and trademark automated search systems, in addition to other electronic, microfilm and print resources.

Trained staff is available to assist public users. Computer workstations provide automated searches of more than 6.7 million patents issued from 1790 to the current week of issue using the patent examiner systems Web-based Examiner Search Tool (WEST) and Examiner Automated Search Tool (EAST), the USPTO Web site, and over 400,000 pending published patent applications. Full document text may be searched on U.S. patents issued since 1971 and optical character recognition text from 1920 to 1970. U.S. patent images from 1790 to the present may be retrieved for viewing or printing. Some foreign patent documents are available in EAST and WEST.

Online searching of pending, registered, and dead trademarks is available using the trademark examining attorney automated systems X-Search, Trademark Trial and Appeal Board VUE (TTABVUE), Trademark Image Capture System (TICRS), and the Trademark Reporting and Monitoring System (PC-TRAM). In addition, a complete collection of trademark registrations in numerical order dating from 1870 is available online.

The public search room will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday-Friday, except federal holidays.

At the conclusion of the agency’s move in the early spring of next year, over 7,000 USPTO employees and contractors will occupy the five buildings of the Alexandria campus.

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