This course, evolving since 1993, is a unique academic offering at any U.S. law school. It is a cross platform "consumer" survey course to search, mine and manipulate patent and non-patent literature data. It teaches transferable skills consistent with the UNH School of Law Information Literacy Plan. It is taught in collaboration with patent data vendors and related guest speakers. This is a hands on course. The work product is a novelty or patent landscape report. Themes of this course include:



Multiplicity of sources

Types of sources

Applications

Multiple access points to same data

Who uses patent data sources

Why use patent data sources

Factors to choose access points

Search approach

Who drives the dollar chain for searches

Free, low fee and premium patent sources

In house and/or outsource searches

Considerations as to who performs differing types of searches

What is the standard of care for patent searches

How to deal with questions of lack of integrity in patent documents

The evolving role of the web in patent searching