Announcing FamPat - A New International Patent Database from Questel•Orbit by Nancy Lambert - Questel•Orbit recently announced the release of FamPat, the family-based version of its international patent database PlusPat. An interesting feature of FamPat is that it gives searchers a choice of how broad a patent family they may display. First, some background. Like PlusPat, FamPat has probably the broadest country and time coverage of any subject-searchable patent database. It covers 75 patenting authorities, and some countries go back to the early 20th century (or even earlier: Germany goes back to 1877). The very early records only have numeric information. However, this includes ECLA classes in some cases, so they can be retrieved in subject searches.