Prior-art searching at the German patent office with EMIR (EDP-Microfilm- Integrated-Retrieval)

Because of the urgent need to reduce the space requirements for accommodation of the paper search files the German Patent Office has developed EMIR, a computer-aided search system using roll microfilm as storage medium. Prior art searching with EMIR has some advantages over manual searching in classified search files 1,2. At present about 300 000 patent documents (AT, CH, FR, GB, US) published before 1950 have been filmed on 500 roll microfilms (16 mm) mounted in 3M- cartridges. With the help of a special retrieval software and disks containing the bibliographical data— one disk per microfilm—this collection can be searched at three retrieval stations (one personal computer and one microfilm (MF) reader per station). Each rollfilm contains about 2500 document pages. The retrieval program written in BASIC enables dialog searching in the stored material according to document country, document number, IPC-unit range, publication interval and keywords.