Latest addition to AusPat
19 May 2011
AusPat now provides full text searching of Australian patent records dating back to 1904.
What is AusPat?
AusPat is a comprehensive, online Australian patent search tool provided free of charge by IP Australia. The AusPat database enables customers to explore the vast information residing in the Australian patent collection. IP Australia, through AusPat, is enabling all Australians to derive maximum value from our IP system through our effective information services.
To enable AusPat to be one of the world's leading patent databases, we had to convert millions of records stored in paper, microfiche and different digital files. This was done under the Patent Backcapture project.
Converting Australia's patent past
The Backcapture project was established to convert published patent specifications covering more than 100 years. The project collected records dating from 1904 to 2008 and converted them into a consistent, digital and text searchable format.
Since 1904 a number of mediums have been used to record and store the specifications. These mediums include:
- Books (1904 to 1977)
- Microfiche (1978 to 1998)
- CD (1999 to 2008)
AU B documents from 1986 and all documents from 1998 are bookmarked so that a text based search can be conducted on the whole patent specification, or individual elements such as the abstract or claims only. These records are available in high quality Optical Character Recognition (OCR) providing accuracy levels of between 99.4 - 99.6% making AusPat search results accurate, immediate and reliable.
Making the archives accessible
The Back-capture project has enabled specifications to be publicly available on the Internet through the AusPat database. In effect, IP Australia has opened up its archives to anyone with access to the web. AusPat has data from over 37 million documents in total including:
- 7,300 volumes of books, and
- 620,000 microfiche films.
Did you know?
Prior to the Back-capture project, the specifications contained in books, microfiche and CD's were stored in various locations throughout IP Australia's premises. In total these collections occupied approx 228 m2 of floor space. In its consolidated format, this data now occupies two terabytes of disk space stored on a server the size of an average PC.
Get Searching
To search the new data, simply visit AusPat.
Note: records prior to 1920 can only be accessed through searching the application number and/or the full specifications as no other data was captured during that era.
Last Updated: 15/9/2012
