AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 



OF 



PATENTS RELATED TO COASTAL ENGINEERING 



by ^ 

 Robert E. Ray^ Michael D. Dickey, and Annie M. Lyles 



I . INTRODUCTION 



A patent is a legal document defining an invention and granting the 

 inventor control of the manufacture, use, and sales of the invention in 

 the United States for 17 years. It is valuable both as a grant of rights 

 to the inventor and as a source of new ideas and, in cases where labora- 

 tory or field testing was conducted before application for a patent, of 

 information on the performance of an invention. By the end of 1976, the 

 United States had issued over 4 million patents. Searching such a mas- 

 sive collection for patents in particular categories is difficult, and 

 scientists and engineers have found that problems with the classification 

 system make use of the collection prohibitively time consuming. 



The Coastal Engineering Research Center (CERC) has collected patents 

 issued between 1967 and 1976 that are related to the Center's fields of 

 interest and the Corps of Engineers' responsibilities. The collection is 

 located in the Center's library. A three-volume bibliographical guide to 

 that collection has been prepared to simplify the searcher's task of find- 

 ing needed patents. Each volume contains a list of the numbers and titles 

 of the patents described in the volume, annotations giving information on 

 each patent, and a subject index based on assigned keywords. The bibli- 

 ography has been published as a separate appendix to this report and has 

 been distributed only to the libraries listed in Table 1, but it may be 

 ordered from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) . This 

 report discusses the information in patents and the methods of searching 

 a general collection of patents for information on a particular type of 

 invention. It describes the search methods used to find patents for the 

 CERC collection, the format of the CERC bibliography, and the methods of 

 using the bibliography to find patents related to coastal engineering. 



The Shore Protection Manual (SPM) (U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, 

 Coastal Engineering Research Center, 1977)1 defines coastal engineering 

 as "the application of the physical and engineering sciences to the plan- 

 ning, design and construction of works to modify or control the interac- 

 tion of the air, sea, and land in the coastal zone for the benefit of man 

 and for the enhancement of natural shoreline resources." The Corps' 

 involvement in coastal engineering includes shore and beach restoration 

 and protection, hurricane flood protection, construction and operation 



^U.S. ARMY, CORPS OF ENGINEERS, COASTAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH CENTER, 

 Shore Protection Manual, 3d ed.. Vols. I, II, and III, Stock No. 

 008-022-00113-1, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 

 1977, 1,262 pp. 



