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Standards: Basics of Standards

This subject guide gives an introduction about Standards and covers major sets of standards available at NUS Libraries: Singapore Standards, British Standards, IEC Standards, IEEE Standards and ASTM standards.

Why are Standards important?

According to Enterprise Singapore, standards gives the assurance of quality and reliability as well as enables business sustainability through interoperability.

Why search for Standards?

​​​​​​Standards is a great reference source for any project, especially those that involve designing and prototyping. Here's how standards can help you:

Adoption of Standards

It is common for many major standards such as ISO, IEC and EN to be adopted by other standards. The standard number usually gives an indication of adoption where standards are equivalent.

Example: UNI EN ISO 9001

  • ISO 9001 is a standard originally approved by ISO
  • It was adopted by the European Committee for Standardisation, so the 'EN' prefix was added to the standard, i.e. EN ISO 9001
  • It then got adopted by the Italian national standard body, so the 'UNI' prefix was added to the standard, i.e. UNI EN ISO 9001

The three standards, ISO 9001, EN ISO 9001 and UNI EN ISO 9001 are identical other than the reference numbers.

Question: The library does not have Italian Standards. What if you need UNI EN ISO 9001?

NUS Libraries has a good set of British Standards through our subscription to British Standards Online (BSOL). Since the UK has adopted ISO 9001, you can search for this version (i.e. BS EN ISO 9001) in BSOL. The content is identical to UNI EN ISO 9001.

Note: The above principle does not apply to Eurocodes and National Annexes as there are likely to be differences between countries for these.