Add-ons that add value to information - A VIP Editorial
Jinfo Blog

By Sarah Hinton

Abstract

There is a lot of news available for free on the internet from individual publishers and search engines. Much can be delivered via email alerting, RSS feeds and sometimes even custom alerting. There are numerous patent sites out there, offering basic patent searching, machine translations and the ability to download the full patent, also all for free.

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There is a lot of news available for free on the internet from individual publishers and search engines. Much can be delivered via email alerting, RSS feeds and sometimes even custom alerting. There are numerous patent sites out there, offering basic patent searching, machine translations and the ability to download the full patent, also all for free.

Yet despite the many free options available, there remains a strong market for premium news and patent search and analysis tools. I sometimes get asked why. For those who regularly need to search in-depth across news or patents using specialist tools the reasons are probably obvious. However it’s not an unreasonable question for the “lighter searcher” – who finds enough for their day-to-day requirements using free sources – to ask. It therefore also merits a better answer than “well, the paid sources allow you to do much more”.

The two reviews in this issue provide very thorough examinations of a news platform and a patent search and analysis tool, but they also do an excellent job of illustrating just why there is still a demand for specialist, premium search tools.

Only a few years ago, a researcher with access to a good news database could often be the first to send out an alert covering an important story. This is no longer the case. In fact, it’s very hard to get a scoop these days! Web-based news alerts are frequently ahead of the premium news aggregator and many of my users have a few of those set up for free. Therefore premium news source must be worthwhile for more reasons than currency, such as a comprehensive source list that includes a good selection of subscription-only sources, a much more powerful search interface, flexible alerting and stronger document delivery options. A good, long archive is valuable and of course, you have all the sources under one roof. These features have to work well together in order to achieve something that is well ahead of any free offerings.

Conversely, although intellectual property (IP) searching requires the ability to find the latest patents, the “scoop” is often the patent discovered through the backwards-looking prior-art search for which the premium sources are a clear winner over the free. The extra strength and flexibility of the premium patents search interface, coupled with the skills of the searcher, are vital for digging around to find out whether a concept has already been patented by someone else. Premium sources must also facilitate bulk downloading, storage of large result sets and analysis tools. I’ve found that patent analysts are amongst the most demanding of customers for IP platform providers. This can be complicated stuff.

We are always advised to keep our users in mind and tailor the information services to the needs of our organisation – and rightly so. Reading VIP reviews enables us to learn about unfamiliar products, but can also give us a better understanding of why we need these tools and what it is we do with them that helps our users and clients in ways beyond what they are able to do for themselves. It is this ability to go “one step further” that brings the enquirer back to us time and again.

This editorial appears in VIP Magazine No. 100, February 2012.

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