Nancy Brown-Martinez just wanted an easier way for her students to haul the large rolls of architectural drawings up from the drawers tucked away in the third basement of Zimmerman Library up to the public reading rooms on the main floor.
Photo (l. to r.): Ray Waggerman, Ellen Evans-Colburn and Nancy Brown.
Her students Ellen Evans-Colburn, the Beatrice Chauvenet fellow at the Center for Southwest Research, and collections assistant Ray Waggerman spend much of their time working with library visitors who want to view architectural drawings and knew they needed a better way to handle the heavy materials.
When they used the ordinary book carts, the drawings kept rolling off. Evens-Colburn and Waggerman tried carrying the rolls, but they were so bulky one person could only carry one or two at a time.
Brown-Martinez, the reference coordinator and archivist at the Center for Southwest Research and Evans-Colburn scoured the library equipment catalogs without finding a solution. So Brown-Martinez started thinking about a cart with a roll trough top –like two uplifted arms- to hold the plans in place while they were being moved.
She went to the metal workers at the university physical plant and drew her idea. The metal workers mounted it on top of an old library cart, and Evans-Colburn and Waggerman began using it.
It proved perfect for rolling and loading large flat maps and artwork while searching for a particular piece at the bottom of the libraries wide flat drawers. It was also just the solution for moving a number of heavy architectural drawings up to the public reading rooms.
And yes, it did look just like a big empty metal taco shell, leading the architecture crew at the Center to instantly dub it the “Taco Cart.”
It worked so well, Brown-Martinez knew other libraries with the same sort of problems moving heavy architectural drawings would use their new gadget as well. She applied, and received a patent.
This brought her to the Science and Technology Corporation, a non-profit corporation chartered to license and market the intellectual property produced by university faculty and staff. STC surveyed the market, and couldn’t find a way to make the invention profitable to license, so they handed the responsibility for marketing the invention back to the would-be entrepreneurs.
Now Brown-Martinez is left with the dilemma of many entrepreneurs -- a good working product that solves the problem and no simple way to get it into the market place.
She has figured out a possible way to market the “Taco Cart.” She is striking out on her own, along with her husband, through his family business. They plan to fabricate the unit and offer it on the open market.
In the meantime, they keep finding new uses for the invention. Brown-Martinez, Evans-Colburn and Waggerman use it to process new collections and find the shape helps to preserve the roundness of the rolls of drawings they carry. It doesn’t flatten or reshape the rolls.
Brown-Martinez says, “The carts are perfect in every way. As more people know about them, they will find more ways to utilize them.”
Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627