Keld Simonsen wrote on 2002-01-04 14:52 UTC:
> Another way to get gratis access to ISO specs: read them at
> the library! My local libraray (head department) carries
> all ISO standards.
I enjoy living right next to one of the best and largest university
libraries in the UK, one of the copyright libraries that are entitled to
a free copy of everything published in the UK, and even they have only
British standards, which includes just those ISO standards which have
been adopted as British Standards. This is only a fraction of all ISO
standards and even these are only available with far over a year delay.
On the positive side is that we now have at least easily online access
to all these, but again unfortunately only final standards, not any of
the drafts, which would often be more interesting to comment on.
When I was in the US, it was the same, only ANSI/ISO standards were
available in libraries, not a full set of ISO standards. In Germany, it
was far worse, as not even the DIN standards are easily available in
libraries there. DIN is probabaly one of the most paranoid publishers on
the planet, and perhaps politically most responsible for much of the
de-facto unavailability of ISO specs.
What I hope ISO will be in a few years:
- all standards are freely available on the net forever,
including old versions
- final versions of standards should come with a digital signature
(e.g. GPG)
- all standards contain an email address to submit bug reports to
(I have yet to see an ISO standard that doesn't contain at least
one annoying typo), and there should be a simple procedure to
fix obvious editorial bugs in final standards within a few days,
recognizing that reporting bugs is no fun if they will not get
fixed this year.
- a central news or mailing list server that offers a discussion list
for every standard which is accessible to both the general public
and read regularly by at least some of the committee members
- completely paper-free online balloting and distribution of
committee documents
A few committees (and I value that those Keld serves on were among the
first) offer already some of these things on their own separate web
sites, but it would be far more convenient to have all this for *all*
standards under the same layout. What I envision is essentially to turn
ISO into the equivalent of sourceforge.net for the standards community.
A single competent organization providing in a cost effective way all
the organizational and IT infrastructure support that standards group
needs. I understand that sourceforge.net is run by a very small team of
competent database/web hackers, far less than 1/10-th the size of ISO CS
in Geneva.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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