On January 9, 1997, IBM launched the IBM Patent Server, a
free publicly available website for search and retrieval of
U.S. Patent bibliographic data and text of all claims for over
two million patents issued from 1971 through 1996.
Developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center, the site also enabled
browsing of scanned images of entire patents which were added
over time. Several favorable news articles were written about
the site, including ones in the New York Times, Newsweek (February
3, 1997), and Communications Week.
Technology
The Patent Server was a testbed of
large-scale database and image server technologies for use as
a high-volume webserver.
| The site used IBM's
Net.Data program to interface to the DB2
Common Server database to store and retrieve 24 Gigabytes
of patent text information. All systems were run on IBM
RS/6000 and SP servers using the AIX operating system.
The content was delivered to the Internet via the IBM
Global Network. |
History
The Almaden Patent Server System was being developed by IBM's
Almaden
Research Center. The Almaden Digital Library team built
an electronic patent library for providing easier access to
patent information at a lower cost than other on-line systems.
The library provided every IBM employee world-wide the ability
to search, view, print, download or fax any U.S. patent from
their desktop via an internet browser or via Lotus
Notes. Included in the web library was the ability to
have direct access to view images of the patents from a 1.3
Terabyte image repository of over 3000 CDs. Patents could
be downloaded in TIFF, PDF, PS and other formats or faxed
to IBM sites around the world.
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