A Guide to Documenting Invention

Is your institution documenting inventors or other creative people? This guide will help you understand invention as a creative process and suggest ways to more fully document your subjects and their work for the historical record. Navigate through the illustration below to learn about:

• Finding inventors to document
• What inventors do when they are inventing
• The kinds of resources and relationships that influence inventors' work
• The types of materials created during the invention process that you can collect
• Techniques you can use to more fully document your subject

This website is the first of several planned phases to disseminate information on methods developed by the Lemelson Center to document the invention process. This is an ongoing project and we will continue to refine, test, and enhance our work as we learn more about invention. For further information and to contribute your comments on this site and on documenting invention as a creative process, please email the Lemelson Center.

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