Fifty years of patent information centres in Russia

The article contains a brief historical review of developing patent information centres in the structure of the State Committee on Inventions and Discoveries (Rospatent) and their participation in establishing the national patent information system. The process is divided into three stages resulting from, first, changes in demands made by the new generations of users of information products and services and, second, renewal of methods, technologies and organizational forms of information support of innovation processes.

► In 1960 the Soviet government established a specialized patent information agency oriented towards provision of primary sources.
► By the end of the 1970s the country had over 5000 regional and industrial branch patent collections containing about 500 millions documents.
► In the 1960s CNIIPI developed automatic translation of the USPTO Official Gazette and an automatic indexing system based on an English-Russian thesaurus.
► In the 1980s the State Patent Information System included 30 regional agencies, 50 central industrial information bodies, 1200 information services of leading enterprises and dozens of regional centres.
► Later research showed the system was oversaturated with primary patent documents and files lacked search facilities; the tasks were to reduce collections, strengthen searching capabilities and increase the correspondence between holdings and needs of customers.