of Commerce, Patent and Trademark Office) 3, a journal including summa- 

 ries of each week's newly issued patents, listed by classification. 

 They may also use the publications of organizations that search the 

 Official Gazette to abstract patent information from classifications 

 selected by the user. Computer-based record systems allowing sorting by 

 classification codes or by keywords are available for parts of the clas- 

 sification system. Publications indexing patents by topics, such as the 

 CERC Bibliography and the earlier Oceania Patents 1959-1968 (Sinha, 

 1969)^, exist for some technical fields. 



IV. PATENT SELECTION FOR THE COLLECTION 



The organization of the Patent Office's classification system did 

 not match the categories of subjects related to coastal engineering; 

 therefore, available aids using that system could not be used alone to 

 find patents for the CERC collection. IVhen writing the claims in their 

 patents, inventors describe the function of their invention in the 

 broadest possible terms, while being more explicit in describing the 

 principles of operation and construction. Following this pattern, the 

 classification system is organized in a heirarchy under functional head- 

 ings. The heading might be a general "class," symbolized by the first 

 number in a classification code, or a subordinate, more specific "sub- 

 class," represented by the second code number. Some functional headings, 

 such as subclass 54, "Dredgers," under class 37, "Excavating," were 

 applicable to coastal engineering and the classification code, in this 

 case 37-54, could be used directly to find interesting patents. In 

 other cases the heading was a class or a general subclass and each patent 

 classified under it had to be inspected. For example, patents for meth- 

 ods of removing marine pollutants were interspersed among those for 

 straining soup under class 210, "Liquid Purification or Separation." 

 This situation required the use of a combination of search methods. 



As a first step in organizing a selection process, the Manual of 

 Classification was used to choose the functional classifications most 

 closely related to the coastal engineering categories. Several Official 

 Gazettes were then reviewed thoroughly and the classification codes of 

 interesting patents noted. The result was the list of classes and cor- 

 responding code numbers given in Table 3. Due to the length and gener- 

 ality of the list, use of the files in the Public Search Room was 

 impractical so the Official Gazettes were searched with special emphasis 

 on the classes in the list. Figure 3 shows a typical page from an 

 Official Gazette. If the information in the Official Gazette was insuf- 

 ficient to determine whether an invention was useful for coastal engi- 

 neering, a copy of the patent was ordered and examined before making a 

 final decision on its selection. 



^DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE, Official Gazette, 

 Washington, D.C., issued weekly. 



'^SINHA, E. , Oceanic Patents 1959-1968, Ocean Engineering Information 

 Series, Vol. 1, Ocean Engineering Information Service, La Jolla, Calif., 

 1969. 



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