LibGuides: Standards: Standards

Introduction

Standards and codes are needed to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life. They establish rules or measures (either minimum or optimum) for a quality or level of performance. Standards are developed by national or international trade associations, groups of industries or government agencies and used locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally. Standards impact nearly every aspect of our lives - the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, even the Canadian flag. Standards have been called "the language of engineering" since engineers must deal with them continually in their working lives.

Get Started with Standards
To identify current standards, search the databases on the Standards Databases page (left) which will show the current version of most standards. Note that most standards are not listed in the Libraries Search. Library staff will be happy to help you locate standards. Please ask contact Justin Fuhr.

If the Engineering Library does not own a standard or code needed by members of the university community, we can see if we can find another library that will lend it. Otherwise, you may have to purchase a copy.

Upon publication, the acronym of the publishing organization together with a number and the current year identifies a given title e.g. CSA Z462-08. Acronyms of organizations involved in writing standards, e.g. CSA, CGSB, IEEE, API or UL, are listed at NSSN: Search Engine for National Standards.

Codes and Regulations

When standards are adopted by a governing body, they become part of the regulatory code of that body and are no longer voluntary and must be adhered to by the affected parties. Examples are the National Building Code of Canada and the Canadian Electrical Code.

Codes may be building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and maintenance codes such as: IBC, IEBC, IEC; IECC; IFC; IMC; IPC; IRC; UBC; BOCA; SBC; ADA; ANSI; and NFPA. The library has some, but not all codes, but the ones that we can be found using the Library Search option.

Standards.gov provides a thorough explanation of the difference between standards and regulations.

Why Do Standards Matter?

Why Do Standards Matter?

Basically, standards are necessary for the effective operation and safety of many materials, products, methods, and services. Standards provide a measureable operation of compatibility for safety, efficacy, efficiency, mass production, and quality control. Below are two illustrations of the need for standards (from Through History With Standards published by the American Standards Association and reprinted in Speaking of Standards, Cahners Books, 1972).

What is a standard and why would you use it? Take a look on this page from the BSI British Standards.

As late as 1927, GREEN lights meant STOP in some US cities and GO in others. There were frequent traffic accidents when travellers visited other cities.

A fire broke out in 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland. Special trains rushed fire equipment from Washington, New York, and Philadelphia. The fire destroyed approximately 2,500 buildings and burned for more than 30 hours … all because the hoses from the other cities would not fit the Baltimore hydrants.

Read about the history of standards:

Engineering Rules by Joanne Yates; Craig N. Murphy Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.
ISBN: 9781421428901
Publication Date: 2019-06-11