Web Portals: Work Smarter

BY:
Cicely Enright

ASTM Standards, Government Regulations and More Combine in One Great Tool

Combine standards and government regulations, add automatic updates, mix in the ability to collaborate with colleagues and make notes in files, and you have the ingredients for an ASTM International standards portal and a very effective business tool.

Choose from portals for biodiesel, environmental due diligence, transportation or the latest industry-specific offering - medical devices. Or, make it a custom collection to meet your company's needs.

The ASTM Web portals, powered by Citation®, provide access to the most up-to-date ASTM International standards in a specific area as well as the most current referenced regulations. Available through one subscription service, the portals also allow you to incorporate company documents.

Additional features include the ability to:

  • Link between standards and referenced regulations,
  • Add notes, images and files to share,
  • Compare current and redlined standards,
  • Track specific locations in standards and regulations for easy future reference, and
  • Collaborate with colleagues through shared text and easy communication.

You can also customize your own portal, basing it on a volume or section of the Annual Book of ASTM Standards or on a specific group of standards used by your firm. As with the other portals, the custom collections provide full-text federal and state standards referenced in the ASTM International standards and your chosen corporate regulations and statutes. A custom collection incorporates the other portal features as well.

The newest and largest addition to the ASTM portals covers medical devices. The medical device portal includes more than 300 ASTM International standards plus more than 1,000 standards from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, the German Institute for Standardization - Deutsches Institut für Normung, the International Electrotechnical Commission, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"The medical device standards portal represents the first true collaboration between the world's major standards developing organizations to develop a comprehensive information package of all the standards referenced in both U.S. and European regulations having to do with medical devices, instrumentation, materials and related areas," says John Pace, ASTM vice president of publications and marketing.

The other portals - biodiesel, environmental due diligence and transportation - bundle crucial information related to their topics.

  • The Biodiesel Web Portal highlights D6751, Specification for Biodiesel Fuel Blend Stock (B100) for Middle Distillate Fuels, and 50 referenced documents as well as key government documents and regulations.
  • The Environmental Due Diligence Web Portal features options with standards from Committee E50 on Environmental Assessment, Risk Management and Corrective Action, featuring E2600, Practice for Assessment of Vapor Intrusion into Structures on Property Involved in Real Estate Transactions, and referenced U.S. regulations.
  • The Transportation Partnership Web Portal, developed for use by the U.S. Department of Transportation, contains more than 9,000 standards and referenced state and federal government regulations.

Portals give users the ability to go to one place to access all needed standards and documents, collaborate with others, annotate information and receive notification as standards change, without losing the historical documents.

That's convenient.

To learn more about the Web portals or to subscribe, visit www.astmproducts.com, or contact Jim S. Thomas, ASTM (phone: 215-431-2411; jsthomas@astm.org).

Industry Sectors

Issue Month
March/April
Issue Year
2010