Aloha from Hawaii (where everyday is a beautiful day.) Stewart Chun, Carole Suzui and Arlene Nagamine welcome you to our corner of paradise. We wish you were here.

Our library has had to cope with the economic downturn, like many other libraries. The library system has responded by furloughing the staff 15 days this fiscal year and another 15 days next fiscal year. If you try to contact us and we don’t respond, go to our homepage at www.hspls.org/feddocs for a list of our furlough days. We have also frozen all new hires and substitute staff. Our book budget was slashed to almost zero this year. We are still hanging in there. The good news is that I have a stable staff that has not changed for many years. This is a big change from the last time we had an economic downturn, about 7 years ago, when Stewart had to work with a rotating staff of temporary librarians.

Your menehune counterparts have been kept busy working and expanding our homepage. Carole has done most of the heavy lifting by periodically refreshing the information and pictures found on each webpage. We have updated our Directory of PTDLs page and also included all the wonderful publications that we have obtained over the years because we are both a Federal Depository Library and a Patent and Trademark Depository Library. We have also included an area for significant patent and trademarks filed with the PTO, both national and locally for Hawaii.

Stewart used the outstanding PowerPoint presentations he has seen over the years at the various training seminars to develop a presentation titled “Recognizing Legal Information From Legal Advice” that he has presented to the Hawaii Library Association Fall Conference on November 12, 2009. If you have Flash Player 9, you can view his PowerPoint at http://www.slideshare.net/hlapowerpoint/recognizing-legal-information-fr.... A transcript of the slides is presented below the Ads by Google.

Stewart gave another presentation before the Board of Education on January 7, 2010 to highlight the activities of our hardworking staff. Stewart took great delight in being able to show our governing Board why he thought a PTDL was needed in Hawaii by showing the contrast between Plant Patents seen on the Internet and various patent discs and the print Plant Patents that display the plant in all its Technicolor glory. You can read a transcript of Stewart’s presentation, as part of the State Librarian’s report, at http://www.boe.k12.hi.us/STATE/BOE/Agenda.nsf/657db2f5950da6b40a256530000a8e69/8cfe6afd82f0205c0a25768c006a53c8/$FILE/StLibReport%201-10-10.PDF.

Finally, Stewart will present another PowerPoint session before the Government Documents class (LIS 618) at University of Hawaii – Manoa on February 25, 2010. The topics for this presentation are to discuss the difference between an FDLP and a PTDL library, a reprise of my presentation on “Recognizing Legal Information From Legal Advice” and a short introduction to Intellectual Property.

Stewart would like to acknowledge all the help he got from the people who have contributed to the various PowerPoint sessions at the annual Patent and Trademark Training Seminars over the years. His various speaking engagements were better because he could “borrow” the ideas freely and would have been struggling more without them. Mahalo nui loa.

That is it from our corner of the world. May you have a roaring good time in this Year of the Tiger.

Stewart Chun
Your humble Patent and Trademark Library Representative