British Standards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BSI British Standards is a division of BSI Group which also includes BSI Management Systems, a management systems registrar and BSI Product Services, a testing organisation. British Standards has a Royal Charter to act as the standards organisation for the UK. It is formally designated as the National Standards Body (NSB) for the UK.
The standards produced are titled British Standard XXXX[-P]:YYYY where XXXX is the number of the standard, P is the number of the part of the standard (where the standard is split into multiple parts) and YYYY is the year in which the standard came into effect. British Standards currently has over 27,000 active standards. Products are commonly specified as meeting a particular British Standard, and in general this can be done without any certification or independent testing. The standard simply provides a shorthand way of claiming that certain specifications are met, while encouraging manufacturers to adhere to a common method for such a specification.
The Kitemark can be used to indicate certification by BSI, but only where a Kitemark scheme has been set up around a particular standard. It is mainly applicable to safety and quality management standards. There is a common misunderstanding that Kitemarks are necessary to prove compliance with any BS standard, but in general it is neither desirable nor possible that every standard be 'policed' in this way.
BSI Group began in 1901 as the Engineering Standards Committee, led by James Mansergh, to standardise the number and type of steel sections, in order to make British manufacturers more efficient and competitive.
Over time the standards developed to cover many aspects of tangible engineering, and then engineering methodologies including quality systems, safety and security.
Another key activity carried out by British Standards is the CE Marking of Medical Devices. The CE 0086 marking can be issued to devices that are found to comply with the Medical Device Directive.
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[edit] Examples of British Standards
- BS 0 A standard for standards specifies Development, Structure and Drafting of British Standards themselves.
- BS 546 for mains power plugs and sockets (older standard)
- BS 1192 for Construction Drawing Practice. Part 5 (BS1192-5:1998) concerns Guide for structuring and exchange of CAD data.
- BS 1363 for mains power plugs and sockets
- BS 1852 resistor value coding
- BS 3704 Specification for rubber condoms (withdrawn)
- BS 5750 for quality management, the source for ISO 9000
- BS 5930 for site investigations
- BS 5950 for structural steel
- BS 6312 for telephone plugs and sockets
- BS 6879 for British geocodes, a superset of ISO 3166-2:GB
- BS 7671 Requirements for Electrical Installations, the IET (formerly IEE) electrical "regs"
- BS 7799 for information security, the source for ISO 17799
- BS 8110 for structural concrete
- BS 15000 for IT Service Management, (ITIL), now ISO 20000
[edit] Publicly Available Specifications
The BSI also publishes a series of Publicly Available Specification (PAS) documents [1]. Unlike a regular British Standard, these are not the outcome of an (often lengthy) industry-wide consensus process, but have instead been sponsored by a single company. As such, they are primarily a marketing tool for individual companies, who can have their private specifications relatively quickly "rubber stamped" by the BSI, rather than the result of an effort in industrial standardization.
[edit] Examples
- BSI PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites
- BSI PAS 100 Composting specification
- BSI PAS 101 Specification for recovered container glass
- BSI PAS 102 Specification for processed glass for selected secondary end markets
- BSI PAS 103 Specification for quality and guidance for good practice in collection and preparation for recycling
- BSI PAS 104 Specification for quality and guidance for good practice for the supply of post consumer wood for consumption in the manufacture of panel board products
- BSI PAS 105 Specification for paper waste
[edit] Availability
British Standards are sold by BSI Business Information [2]. They can also be ordered via the publishing units of many other national standards bodies (ANSI, DIN, etc.) and from several specialized suppliers of technical specifications. Like with the products of other national standards bodies, the per-page price of these documents is substantially higher than that of mass-market books, which hinders access by students and average consumers with a casual interest in such specifications.
Many British Standards (BS) – as well as some of the European and International Standards that were adopted as British Standards (BS EN, BS ISO) – are also available in public and university libraries in the United Kingdom, either on paper or online via a British Standards Online subscription. However, the BSI makes standards available to these libraries only under severe licence restrictions, which forbid loan, inter-library loan, open-shelf access, and copying of more than 10% of a document by library users. The BSI library in Chiswick charges visiting members of the public a fee of £25 per half day [3].
It has been suggested that since the British Standards are part of the body of Statute Law in the UK, being effectively Statutory Instruments, as are other documents like the Building Regulations and the associate Approved Documents, they should like these be freely available to the public. Architects, for example, cannot comply with the Building Regulations in many situations without complying with the explicitly specified British Standard [1]. It is argued that a fundamental principle of law is that it is possible for any person to check the law with which they must comply. However, the funds from sales is used to support research and the work of the institute so this idea would be strongly resisted.
