Visual guide for finding non-patent prior art with Dspace@MIT

Dpsace@MIT is an excellent repository of digital technical documents and is fully accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
In the upper left hand corner I can search or browse Dpsace@MIT.
Let's start with a search for 'touch screen camera'.
The results look good but with over 1,000 let's try to limit the results some with an Advanced Search.
Follow the 'Advanced Search' link.
The Advanced Search page a
From the Advanced Search page I can limit the results by certain publications.  But why do that?
There are many options for restricting the results, but we'll use 'Full Text' for now.
We'll again search for 'touch screen camera'.
Doesn't look like my Advanced Search was much different than searching for the full text.  I'd like to restrict my results to be between April 1994 and April 2004 but unfortunately Dspace@MIT offers no way that I know of to restrict results by date, but we can sort the results by them instead.
Buy sorting the results by issue date I can easily find articles published from 1994 to 2004.
Dspace@MIT also allows us to arrange the results from oldest to newest.
I only had to scroll through results until page 13 until I had articles published starting in 1994.  Let's take a closer look at the article Intelligent Cameral Control for Graphical Environment by Steven Drucker.
Here's the bibliographic information for the article. There's no abstract but that's because I can download the entire article.
I can download the article by following the 'View/Open' link.
Now my article is downloading...
We've now got ourselves a great piece of prior art!

Back to Patent-Ed's Visual Guides to finding prior art  >>

Visual Guide for finding non-patent prior art with SEI

The Software Engineering Institute's digital library is yet another great resource for finding non-patent prior art.
We can search the library by following the 'Search the Library' link.
We have a few search options, let's start with a keyword search for 'touch screen camera'.
And 'Select All' to include all SEI's content.
Not only did I get few results they're aren't even that relevant.  We'll have to refine our search.
I can easily return to the search by following the link above the results.
Instead we'll search for just 'touch screen'.
36 results, that's better.  Let's take a look at the article Emerging Technologies for Software-Reliant Systems of Systems by Grace Lewis.
Here we have some bibliographic and abstract information.
But we can download the entire report for free by following the 'Download Report' link in the middle of the page.
Now that I have the article though, it's not very relevant to my search for prior art related to touch screens.
But let's make sure and search for touch screen anyways.
There's only one result but it cites an article that may be interesting.
We'll check the references by scrolling down and looking for Voyles 1999.
It does look like a relevant article in my search, let's see if we can't find it using Google.
Since I use the Chrome web browser I can enter my search for the author and title in the address bar.
Perfect, looks like Prof. Voyles, like many academics, keeps a website with access to his papers.
Well perhaps the article isn't as relevant as I'd like.
But if I scroll down far enough...
I find a link to download the entire paper for free. Back to Patent-Ed's Visual Guides to finding prior art  >>

Visual guide for finding non-patent prior art with IET

The IET Digital Library is another great place to search for non-patent prior art.
Let's start with an Advance Search by following the link near the top of the page.
With Advance Search I can select the IET publications to include in my search.
I can also choose a number of options options for searching, let's start with Abstract/Title/Keywords.
And search for the keywords 'touch screen camera'.
Let's limit the results by date too; between April 15, 1994 to April 15, 2004.
No results, my search was too specific.
Return to Advance Search and change the keywords were searching for to 'touch screen'.  Remember to restrict the results by date again too.
Great now I have 5 results, let's take a a closer look the article, Experience of Linux and GTK+2 Smartphone by Min-Hong Yun.
Here I have access to the article's bibliographic information and abstract.
IET even has the ISBN number so you can find out easily if your library has it.
But in order to view the entire article from IET's digital library we'll have to buy the article by following the 'Buy This PDF' link. Back to Patent-Ed's Visual Guides to finding prior art  >>