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International standard

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: International Standard Book Number

Ten-digit number assigned before publication to a book or edition thereof. The ISBN identifies various elements of the work, grouping it within a national, geographic, language, or other convenient category and revealing its publisher, title, edition, and volume number. The ISBN is part of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), which was prescribed by the International Organization for Standardization; delegates adopted the numbering system in 1969. The numbers are assigned by publishers and administered by designated national standard book numbering agencies such as the R.R. Bowker Co. in the U.S. and the Standard Book Numbering Agency Ltd. in Britain.

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Wikipedia: International standard
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International standards are standards developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use, worldwide.

International standards may be used either by direct application or by a process of modifying an international standard to suit local conditions. The adoption of international standards results in the creation of equivalent, national standards that are substantially the same as international standards in technical content, but may have (i) editorial differences as to appearance, use of symbols and measurement units, substitution of a point for a comma as the decimal marker, and (ii) differences resulting from conflicts in governmental regulations or industry-specific requirements caused by fundamental climatic, geographical, technological, or infrastructural factors, or the stringency of safety requirements that a given standard authority considers appropriate.

International standards is one way of overcoming technical barriers in international commerce caused by differences among technical regulations and standards developed independently and separately by each nation, national standards organisation, or company. Technical barriers arise when different groups come together, each with a large user base, doing some well established thing that between them is mutually incompatible. Establishing international standards is one way of preventing or overcoming this problem.

Merged links

These links are all into Standards organization, and is primarily about organizations, not about standards.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "International standard" Read more