A Patent Searcher's Personal Chronicle:  40 Years in the Evolution of a Profession^‡

Forty years have passed since this chemist elected to attempt to become an information chemist, thus pursuing a career path he had not heard of during his undergraduate and graduate education. Much has changed during that period. Punched cards, microfilm and microfiche, coordinated term indexes, and more have come and gone. The US Patent and Trademark Office has issued more than 3 million patents, exceeding its total output in all the years that came before. Online database searching replaced prior reliance on printed indexes and classified card files, and now seeks to redefine itself to stand up against the juggernaut of the Internet. In the face of all that change the traditional abstracting and indexing function is still with us, though not without considerable reshaping. This paper surveys this landscape of change and suggests that if we are wise, we will nurture this intellectual activity far into the future.