Standards are the rules and guidelines created by different issuing organizations to ensure that what's created by engineers can produce consistent and repeatable results This is important in many aspects of design, such as:

• Making sure that items are manufactured uniformly
• Ensuring that tests and assessments are conducted reliably
• Facilities and buildings are safe for operation

To learn more about standards, refer to the following e-publication: Teaching and Collecting Technical Standards: A Handbook for Librarians and Educators

Engineering Standards come in several different forms. The ones that are important to note are:

• Limited Consensus Standards: developed by experts within a particular organization to be distributed within said organization
• General Consensus Standards: developed by experts in a particular industry and adopted by the industry
• Government Standards: which are produced by a wide array of government organizations and can either be legally enforced or not legally enforced

A standard is typically represented by the acronym of the issuing organization followed by a number and date of issuance (e.g., ANSI B152.2-1982 or ISO 10096:1997).