Library Guides: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering: Standards and patents

Finding standards

Standards are official publications used in industry and trade to describe specifications and procedures. Standards provide rules and recommendations for; quality, safety, performance and construction, codes of practice, methods of testing, symbols and terminology.

See our how-to-find guide: standards

Intertek Inform (formerly SAI Global / Australian standards online)
Search for Australian Standards by Standard number or keyword. Full text standards are in PDF format. You will need to register in order to view and download documents from this database. Printing requires Acrobat Reader 4.5 or later. Downloaded Standards expire after 24 hours.
ASTM compass
The ASTM Standards and Engineering Digital Library is a collection of standards and technical engineering information, books and journals. The Library covers a broad range of engineering disciplines, including aerospace, biomedical, chemical, civil, environmental, geological, health and safety, industrial, materials science, mechanical, nuclear, petroleum, soil science, and solar engineering.
BSOL : British standards online
Full texts of current and draft British Standards, BSI-adopted European and international standards, handbooks, Codes of Practice, Guidelines and glossaries. May be printed or downloaded.
IEEE Xplore digital library
Provides full-text access to IEEE and IEE transactions, journals, magazines and conference proceedings published since 1988 and current IEEE Standards.

Finding patents

A patent is a contract between the state and an inventor by which a temporary monopoly is granted in return for disclosing all details of the invention. Patents are often the earliest source of information on a new technology.

See our how-to-find guide: patents

Derwent innovations index
This database merges patent information from Derwent World Patents Index with patent citation information from the Derwent Patents Citation Index. It is possible to further search through non-patent citation links to ISI's Web of Science. Includes access to the Derwent chemistry resource of chemical structure searching and the Thomson patent store.
Espacenet
European Patent Office.
The Lens
The Lens serves nearly all of the patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data.

Patent fundamentals for scientists and engineers