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Standards are industry specifications established by both government and for-profit entities and function as rubrics to how projects and processes are to be designed, conducted, or implemented. The bulk of standards is produced by experts in specific areas of the engineering industry. For example, AAMA, the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, is the primary producers of standards specific to the automobile industry.
In many ways, standards can be viewed as best practices in the
Engineering field and are often the quantitative measurement of
established practices and procedures. Standards assist professionals in
the field to meet "either the minimum or optimum requirements" of any
given endeavor that can be understood by those in the field. Standards
also help to establish certain specific, agreed upon expectations among
engineering professionals. Since standards are produced by various
private entities, societies and organizations, there is no
uniform
manner in which they are designated nor is there a standard
timeframe in which they are produced. Furthermore, there is often little
consistency in how they are titled from one edition to another. As a
result, the task of cataloging standards is difficult, and thus, the
collection is not easy to find in the library's catalog.
Because
standards are not catalogued, are voluminous, are not updated according to a consistent schedule, are expensive to produce, and thus to acquire,
and
the demand is usually for the most current edition. We occasionally get requests for older or superceded standards, but we do not house our these do to space constraints. There are some
complete and up-to-date standards, such as those published by ANSI,
American National Standards Industry, an organization that approves
and publishes standards. Due to budgetary constraints, the collection will
consist of those specific items or individual standards that serve the
needs of campus faculty, staff, and students, first and foremost.
The Engineering Library maintains its own database index of standards that the library owns. It is not comprehensive, but is a good a good place to start your search. A good tip when searching this database is to do a search on just the number or the letters preceding the number, which will yield a browsable list. Additionally, the Engineering Library has a nice flowchart that provides a good visual guide to standards searching.
Finally, standards are copyrighted material which prohibits resource sharing services from making it available to patrons who request them. The standards that are housed at the Engineering Library are part of the non-circulating reference collection. If patrons are in need of obtaining a copy of a standard that the library does not possess, the patron will need to contact the publisher or association that produces the specific standard to obtain a copy, at a fairly significant cost. Global Engineering Documents is a company that maintains "the most comprehensive source for standards," and the library staff will recommend that the patron contact Global to obtain personal copies of standards.
Given the nature of standards, the best way to look for standards is to first find out if the patron has any information on the organization or association that produced the document. This fact alone will make it much easier to search for a specific standard.