Representatives of patent information centres in 34 nations have gathered in Warsaw, Poland this week to take part in the PATLIB2008 conference.

Speaking on the first day of the conference, EPO Vice-President Curt Edfjäll said that "making patents understandable" is the future of patent information centres. It is no longer about gaining more users for patent information, but allowing them to use it efficiently, he said, referring to the EPO's reformulated patent information policy.

Alicja Adamczak, president of the Polish Patent Office, which hosted the event, stressed that patent information resources are decisive in building knowledge-based societies and strong economies.

Mr Edfjäll sees a pivotal role for patent information centres, located throughout Europe, in raising patent awareness. Although now even non-experts can search for patents online and for free, they will turn to patent information centres if they need help making their search more efficient or interpreting its results.

We experts have the responsibility to break down barriers to understanding patents so that our customers can use them to their own advantage and that of the society," said Edfjäll, stressing that the success of the EPO's patent information efforts depends on the close co-operation with the national patent offices.

Within the framework of the European Patent Network, the EPO is planning a number of tools to support the national patent offices and regional patent information centres in this task. The improvements include:

i)a simple (à la Google) search in esp@cenet
ii)more language pairs for machine translation in esp@cenet
iii)making search tools used by EPO examiners available to applicants.
iv)The PATLIB2008 conference will take place until Friday, 30 May.

(www.epo.org)