To begin with, the Louisville Metro Inventors Council is no longer active. Louisville still has its SCORE, Small Business Development Center, Community Ventures, Incorporated, its own Innovation and Commercialization Center (handled by Enterprise Corp.), LVL1 (a new hacker space), and me, Rae Shepherd-Shlechter, the Patents and Trademarks Librarian. My focus continues to be on the independent inventor and to help with the successful commercialization of whatever intellectual property he/she creates. I am very lucky to have so much support from the small business community and remain delighted that these groups continue to send me so many referrals. Thank heavens! The LFPL PTRC also continues to have a great relationship with the Central Kentucky Inventor’s Council, which has really become a very large presence in the Midwest for helping the independent inventor.
This past year we were again able to provide educational materials for the Idea Festival in Louisville, and we do have a new Director of Economic Growth and Innovation for Metro Louisville (Ted Smith). I have spoken at some of his sponsored meetings and workshops. This year Director Smith was named a “Local Innovation Champion of Change” by the White House. So all in all, creativity and innovation seemed to be bubbling up in Metro Louisville in 2012.
A new and fun activity I enjoyed in 2012 and again in early February of 2013 was working with a graduate student in an online Government Information Class offered by Northern Kentucky University. Her homework assignment forced me to give a thorough review of both the Federal Depository Collection (I’m also the Government Documents Librarian of the oldest Federal Depository Library in Kentucky) and the Patents and Trademarks Resource Center (the only one in Kentucky).
Finally, Governor Steve Beshear reappointed me to a 2nd term with the Kentucky State Advisory Council on Libraries, so I will have another term to talk up patents and trademarks with librarians, educators, and library user groups from all over Kentucky. Lucky me.