Introduction to British Standards
The British Standards Institute (BSI) enables the creation of standards which guide best practice in various areas. There can be standards for things like health and safety, medical equipment, pharmaceutics as well as many other areas relevant to clinical and laboratory environments. To find a standard, you will need to search in a database called British Standards Online.
This video gives a brief introduction to British Standards:
Access British Standards Online database:
- British Standards Online This link opens in a new window
Access to bibliographic, citation and full text of over 60,000 British, adopted European and International standards.
Searching for Standards
British standards will have a unique code which might start with the letters BS. If you have this code, you can search the database with that, or you can search by keyword.
Once you have searched, you will see a list of results. You can either click on Download PDF or Quick View on the right-hand side of the record to view the entire standard.
A screenshot of the BSOL display, showing standard BS EN 1276
Accessing Standards for the first time & FileOpen plug-in
You will log into BSOL with your usual username and password.
The first time you view documents from BSOL, you may need to download the FileOpen plug-in. Staff and student laptops and the desktop computers on campus already have FileOpen installed but you will still need to check the browser settings of the device you are using to make sure you can access PDF’s.
The default PDF viewer on campus computers is Edge, which doesn’t support FileOpen. You need to actively choose to open documents in Adobe, either by right clicking and selecting “Open With” or by opening Adobe first. Further details of how to do this for Edge and other browsers can be found in this guide How to access PDFs using the FileOpen Plugin