You can begin your patent search using Google Patent Search

If this doesn't produce the results you need, the engineering librarian has put together a web resource guide on how to conduct a thorough patent search, Patent and Trademark Searching

Access 1Search from the library home page.

1Search is the library's discovery tool--it is not only our catalog for books and other library resources held here at OSU, it is also the Summit shared catalog, showing you books and other resources available at our academic partner libraries throughout the Northwest, most of which you can borrow (delivered within 3-5 business days, free of charge).

But it also searches across our many databases, to show you a wide variety of journal, newspaper and magazine articles, maps, videos and government documents on your subject.

You can find "facets" on the right of a 1Search results page to use to quickly focus your search to the type of resource you want.

One caveat: much of the type of information businesses need is not found in this type of search. If you need a more in-depth search of specific databases you may choose one of them to search directly from the Library Databases list on the OSU Libraries page, or use the ones listed in this guide..

Working in partnership with several libraries, Google has digitized millions of in-copyright and out of copyright books.  Your access to these books will vary: some are available in full-text, some provide substantial preview views, and some provide only snippet (sentence-length) views.  You can find the books in libraries, purchase them, or view the available portions online. If the entire book is not available online, use 1Search to see if we have the book. If our library does not have the book, we can get it for you!

Here are some very useful resources for finding demographics online.

THE primary source of demographic information from the U.S. Government is the found using American Fact Finder (US Census and other agencies; pulls data from many current and recent censuses and surveys into one place)

Information about towns in Oregon (including Portland) is included the Oregon Explorer Rural Communities

Income data from the Current Population Survey (US Census)

Consumer spending data is collected in Consumer Expenditure Surveys (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

StateMaster compiles primary source data into a service that allows you to compare statistics between different states in the US -- for example you can compare the percentage of toothless Americans over 65 years of age in every state.

[photo from flickr: erewhon]

NAICS Lookup from the U.S. Census Bureau

What is NAICS? The North American Industry Classification System or NAICS is a federal classification system used by Canada, Mexico, and the United States to classify business establishments for the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and publishing statistical data relating to the business economy.

For business and/or market research, you may wish to go directly to those library guides for more options and information (see links in the Multi-Disciplinary Research box on this page). Below are listed some databases that have proven useful.