U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

The entire U.S. patent and trademark document collections are stored in electronic form to facilitate electronic search, retrieval, display, and dissemination.  In order to ensure data integrity, a rigorous quality validation program is carried out during both image capture and after the image data is written to optical platter.  Validation services performed by AAT require:

• Visually inspecting approximately 3,500 patent documents per week

• Re-validating and re-inspecting patents with errors identified during the initial inspection (approximately 150 patent documents per week)

• Visually inspecting newly issued trademark registrations (approximately 1,600 per week)

• Visually inspecting OCR text data (approximately 1,100 documents per week)

• Visually inspecting foreign images

 AAT staff also:

• Prepare source documents to be indexed and captured

• Sort documents

• Enhance faulty documents

• Batch (organize) documents

• Compare source document to digitized documents

• Remove documents that are unreadable

• Reduce/Enlarge documents

• Improve quality of documents

• Update and track batch sheets

• Complete tracking logs

• Photocopy documents

• Affix bar code labels to documents

• Index documents

• Scan documents

• Track Input/Output tapes

• Perform the Tape Copy (Filter) Process

• Perform cropping

• Physically inspect the documents to verify and ensure the quality of data

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