A paperless patent documentation and information centre to assist in the transfer of technology to non-industrialized countries

Non-industrialized countries desiring to provide patent documentation and information services should seek cooperation with countries having similar backgrounds to form a regional patent documentation and information centre. This centre should supply bibliographic patent information, copies of patent documents, SDI services, state-of-the-art searches and novelty searches. A paper based patent collection is not feasible in view of the workload involved (more than 300 man-yr) and the necessary storage capacity (15 km of paper documents). Consequently microform and EDP facilities should be used whenever convenient. To provide information on patent documents of the member countries a centralized bibliographic data base and a complete collection of patent documents in microform should be established. Information on patent documents of other countries should be obtained from existing worldwide bibliographic data bases, and from search files existing elsewhere. Patent collections in microform of the most important countries should be acquired and for certain fields of high regional interest inhouse search files could be established.