Information at Your Fingertips — and in Your Hands

Increasing Availability

by Cicely Enright

What’s new in ASTM International information delivery? New tools make it easier to find and refer to ASTM information, particularly online, both at the ASTM Web site and elsewhere on the Internet.

Full Text Standards Search

Full text searching is now available on the ASTM International Web site, enabling you to search for words embedded in any section of an active ASTM standard, including footnotes. Click here or go to the “Standards” navigation bar and then select full text search in the search options. The search engine is powered by Google, which means that your search terms are compared against the full text of the standards, and your results are returned in a weighted order from most relevant to least. Full text searching capability is a benefit of ASTM International now offering its standards in HTML format.

Abstracts

Not all standards are required to have significance and use statements, but all standards without this feature (other than terminology documents) are now gaining a new feature for the Web: abstracts. Similar to the familiar pithy paragraphs at the start of technical journal articles, standards abstracts give more information about and more search terms for a specification or test method, which in turn reveal more about its breadth and depth. That’s helpful to professionals finding a standard for the first time and not knowing, without the complete content, whether it is what they need. When major revisions to such standards occur, the abstracts will also be revised.

Reference Linking

Through a tool newly applied to ASTM standards online, users will now be able to find their way to a standard’s ASTM Web summary page from other scholarly publications. The connections have existed for the last few years for online ASTM technical journal references, which take the reader from citations in one publication to content in another. The behind the scenes system that makes it possible is Digital Object Identifier assignment, which ASTM has implemented by submitting its standards to CrossRef, a registrar for DOIs for scholarly and professional publications.

New Digital Library Works

Another 250 Special Technical Publications can now be found in the ASTM Digital Library, including the first in the series, Commemorative of the Life and Work of Charles Benjamin Dudley, Ph.D., ASTM’s founder. The newly available STPs date mostly from the 1930s to the 1950s and cover subjects ranging from automotive materials, soils and thermal insulation to radiography, fatigue and sieving. This group brings the total of digitized STPs to 1,400.

Print on Demand

Through a newly implemented production system, ASTM Special Technical Publications and manuals will never go out of print. That way, if you would like to add a printed edition of an STP or monograph to your home or office library that was previously out of print and is in our Digital Library, a soft cover version can now be ordered. The process is designed to provide reasonably priced, good quality print copies.