How to obtain standards for students and faculty projects
VCU Libraries collections include many technical and engineering standards from ASTM International, available on ASTM Compass and from IEEE, available on IEEE Xplore. Standards from many other organizations are not part of VCU Libraries’ collections. For these standards, access becomes more complicated.
VCU Libraries’ Interlibrary Loan system includes a form to request standards, but few libraries are able to loan their standards. Standards requests in interlibrary loan usually end up in the hands of Ibironke Lawal, the science and engineering collections librarian. She usually obtains electronic access as a one-off purchase for the person who made the request. Because these purchases do not become part of the VCU Libraries collections, Dr. Lawal is cautious about purchasing standards when they are extremely expensive. To save time, requests for standards can be emailed to Dr. Lawal directly at [email protected].
While VCU Libraries has its own way of handling standards, the challenges for this kind of request are not unique to VCU. Dr. Lawal, along with Mark M. England from the University of Utah, documented the variety of approaches that academic libraries take to collecting standards and making standards available in their recent article in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.
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