Users can also access later patents that reference the existing document. This provides users information about renewal status of patents. Espace provides free access to patent information from the U.S., Europe and Japan. Access is also provided to a comprehensive collection of patents published worldwide since 1920. For documents published since 1970, each patent family in the collection has a representative document with a searchable English-language title and abstract.
Users can display and print out the bibliographic data including the abstract.
The database can be searched by 27 fields, including title, number, date, assignee, inventor, abstract, class, and examiner. Users must have a TIFF viewer to view the full image of patents. In addition, students, faculty and staff with an ECU Microsoft Exchange email account may access from off-campus using the proxy server.