Standards

Standards guide designers towards consistency, safety, and reliability, making them essential in ensuring user safety and product quality. This is a Primer on Engineering Standards: the expanded textbook Edition. It offers an in-depth look at standards creation and compliance, serving as a comprehensive reference for students: engineering educators and practicing engineers.

Technical standards are essential for guiding the design, manufacture, testing, and use of products, materials, and components. To prepare students, particularly engineering students, for the workforce, universities are integrating standards into their curricula. Employers emphasize the importance of graduates being familiar with standards. However, there is limited information on developing standards information literacy, which involves understanding the standardization process, identifying types of standards, and effectively locating, evaluating, and using standards. Libraries and librarians play a crucial role in standards education, not only by curating standards but also by teaching standards information literacy. This text provides background information for librarians on technical standards and best practices for collection development. It also offers a model for librarians and instructors to develop a standards information literacy curriculum, essential for equipping students with the knowledge and skills needed for their careers.