It’s not an uncommon problem — You discover that a standard you use is obsolete. How do you find the replacement standards?
Here at Document Center, I had a call yesterday from a customer who went to the ANSI webstore and was unable to find a standard there. Turns out there’s a lot of standards that are not on the ANSI website. The customer was perplexed and didn’t know what to do. This is a situation that many standards users find themselves in — They have a document that they have been using or is called out in a contract or documentation and “poof!” it seems to have disappeared.
Well, I’m glad the customer gave us a call, because our system is set up to answer just this very question! The first thing I did was check in our database and that’s when I found the source of the problem. The standard (ANSI B18.17) was withdrawn in 1993 and ANSI does not track these obsolete documents. Of course, the Document Center database does and you can find it by searching for ANSI B18.17 or just B18.17.
How did I help this person find a replacement standard? Because ANSI B18.17 was cancelled without replacement, we had to do a search for a document that would take it’s place rather than follow the advice of the source organization. So we put “wing nut” in the search field and came up with plenty of choices. “There it is!” said my customer, looking at the ASME B18.6.9.
There are other tools on our website as well, so here’s some additional tips:
When you look on the Document Center website, if an obsolete standard has a notation “See the following:” use the link provided to find the replacement standard.
You can also look at the bottom of the bibliographic record of the obsolete standard. If there’s a link “To find similar standards by…” try the link. It will take you to documents that are in the same ICS Code or FSC Classification, or even the same ASTM collection volume. You’ll use that list to find an appropriate replacement standard.
Or you can also do what we did: Search for a topic or portion of the title. You’ll get a results page with similar standards to choose from.
Still having trouble? Give us a call! As our customer said, “I don’t know why I bother with other services when Document Center has all the information I need!” You can get in touch with us by phone (650-591-7600), fax (650-591-7617) or email (info@document-center.com). And of course our webstore www.document-center.com has information on over 500,000 different standards from over 350 different publishers.
