Finding standards

About standards

Standards provide specifications and guidelines for products, services, and systems. They’re developed based on specialised expertise and are issued by a range of organisations around the world.

Standards may be international, regional, or national, or they may be issued by a specialist body in a particular domain.

How to search for standards

If you know which standard you’re looking for:

1. Identify the relevant database from the list below.
2. Search the database by standard number or title.

To browse available standards on a topic:

1. Search by keyword in any of the standards databases listed below with a relevant scope.
2. Use a search engine to identify existing standards based on a relevant country or professional organisation.

Some publishers may require additional steps, such as user registration, when downloading or printing standards.

Accessing standards

Australian/New Zealand Standards (AS/NZ)

Access AS/NZ standards via Standards Australia on i2i. You can view standards online directly from within the database by clicking the 'View Online' button. This allows you to access content without downloading it.

To download and view standards from this database, please try the following:

Downloading PDFs:

1. If you're using Google Chrome, open the browser and enter chrome://settings/content/pdfDocuments in the address bar.
2. Enable the option to Download PDFs.

Viewing PDFs:

To access downloaded PDFs, please ensure you have a pdf reader installed:

1. If you don’t already have a PDF reader, install Adobe Reader.
2. After installing the PDF reader, you may need to disable the Global Object Security Policy (GOSP). This setting controls how cookies behave in Adobe Reader, Acrobat, and PDF-XChange apps. Disabling GOSP is essential for Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected content to work properly.

For more details on how to use the i2i database, please refer to the i2i support page.

International Standards (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Standards, and British Standards (BS)

Most ISO standards and 50% of IEC standards are available as identical British standards via British Standards Online.

If no British implementation is available, email details of the relevant standard to stem@usyd.libanswers.com.

If possible, the requested standard will be made available via IHS Engineering Workbench.

British Standards Online also requires use of the FileOpen plugin when downloading or printing standards, as detailed above.

American Society for Testing and Materials Standards (ASTM)

Available via ASTM Digital Library.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards (IEEE)

Available via IEEE Xplore.

To restrict your search results to standards, use the drop-down menu next to the search box or filter a page of results.

Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Technical Papers

SAE Technical Papers are supplied on demand. Email your request to stem@usyd.libanswers.com.

All other standards

For all other standards:

1. Search the Library Catalogue using the standard number (e.g. AS/NZS 1163:2016) or title of the standard.
2. If the standard is not available via Library Catalogue search, email the details to stem@usyd.libanswers.com.