Standards are used in engineering or industrial practices and specify the rules, techniques, conditions, characteristics, and technical details that must be met by the products, systems, and processes the standards cover. Standards can be mandatory or voluntary. Standards are useful to make sure that products meet a certain level of quality and also allow standard-compliant equipment to work together easily.
 
Grainger Engineering library has physical copies of the standards from American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM). To access information on standards online, check out the Grainger Library website.