Production schedule snapshot, 1976

On the first floor of Rochdale House, a team under Mr Hearn dealt with receipts of source documents for World Patent Index, of three main kinds.

Some 7000 patent specifications weekly arrived as paper hard copy, from: 
West Germany 1620 (of which 1170 unexamined patents), USA 1500, France 900, Great Britain 800, Soviet Union 650, Canada 450, Netherlands 430 (of which 350 unexamined patents), Switzerland 320, East Germany 180, Austria 175.

A complete set of 330 Belgian patents per week arrived as 8-up aperture cards, converted to hard copy using Ozalid machines in the basement of Rochdale House.

From Tokyo came abstracts of Japanese patents of chemical interest already dealt with locally via summary in Japanese and then translation of the abstract into English. These arrived with their accompanying drawings, at a weekly average of 400 examined and 1050 unexamined patents.

Selections from the Official Gazettes were also made in the case of 13 further countries averaging 100 items each per week.

Having been checked for omissions, hard copy receipts were immediately microfilmed. Then the bibliographical details including all priorities were marked off and punched onto cards. This punched card input was transferred to magnetic tape, and one or more computer edit runs carried out to indicate and rectify errors.

In a twice-weekly priority search run, the error-free card input tapes were compared with a master file containing all the priorities ever recorded on the system, so as to establish which documents contained new priorities. These new 'basics' were then sent out to part-time outworkers who produced abstracts within a turnaround time of one week.

Returned abstracts were reviewed by full-time Derwent technical staff, who edited the special titles provided by the abstractors, assigned character codes for the patentees and, for chemically related basics (some 40%) assigned Central Patents Index classes based on their technical content.

All this information was then punched using flexowriters, onto paper tape which, after computer edit and correction runs, resulted in an error-free input magnetic tape. Using the specification number as common denominator, the information on these input tapes and the punched cards was merged on a weekly basis and used to update the master file, with new accession numbers and classes based on the IPC being applied automatically by the system. This weekly process served also to draw off from the master file information about equivalents and to create new tapes for computer-driven printing of the various weekly indexes and for carrying out current awareness searches

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