Hawaii State
Public Library System

Hawaii State Library PTRC Services

Hawaii State Library has been a Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) since December 18, 1989. The Hawaii State Library PTRC is located within the Federal Document Section on the 2nd floor of the library.

PTRCs are libraries designated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to provide the public free access to patent and trademark information resources and services made available by the USPTO.

Have a great idea for an invention or product?  Need to find out how to protect your intellectual property? We can help you! Start off by conducting patent or trademark search at the Federal Documents Section of the Hawaii State Library or checking out our intellectual property guide!  We provide walk-in, telephone and online assistance.

Walk-in & Telephone Hours:

Our PTRC Services include:

• Collection of full-color plant patents in print
• One computer dedicated to patent and trademark searching
• Free access to Patent and Trademark Databases, including examiner-based patent search systems, PubEAST and PubWEST
• Training on preliminary patent search
• Specialized reference services relating to patent, trademarks and copyright
• Intellectual property seminars on patents, trademarks, copyright and entrepreneurship topics

PubEAST and PubWEST

PubEAST and PubWEST are the public versions of the patent search tools used by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent examiners. Access to PubEAST and PubWEST are available at Hawaii State Library, Lihue Public Library and Kahului Public Library.

Benefits of PubWEST & PubEAST:

• Speed – Faster flip rate going through documents
• Proximity searching: adjacency, near, with (same sentence), same (same paragraph)
• Keyword in Context (KWIC) display
• Simultaneous searching across multiple similar databases
• Capability of searching EPO & JPO Abstracts, & Foreign Patent Retrieval system
• Better display options
• OCR text searching back to 1920
• Relevancy ranking that indicates the number of times a particular term accurs in a set of documents from a keyword search and ranks the search results

Patents issued from 1790 to 1920 are searchable only by patent number, issue date and classification.

PubWEST & PubEAST Availability Contacts: