Amendments are issued to update specific areas of the content of a standard. The changes are introduced to reflect current industrial and business practices. In particular, amendments are often used as a quick and relatively efficient way of addressing unforeseen safety concerns that appear during practical application of a standard. Amendments can be produced relatively quickly when compared to a revision which involves a full committee review of the entire content of the standard. Issuing an amendment ensures that standards are kept up-to-date between different editions. With the introduction of new technologies, the process of how BSI implements amendments has seen some significant changes which now allow us to provide improved delivery of customer-focused and user-friendly documents.
History of development
Years ago amendments were supplied as a separate sheet of instructions for the customer to alter their own base product. The changes introduced by the amendments were not incorporated into the base standard until the original print run of that particular product had been spent. Typically print runs of around 1400 were produced for each standard.
Consequently the vast majority of BSI's standards collection were not available as consolidated editions (i.e. with all amendments incorporated into standard). Changes introduced by amendment were not incorporated unless a reprint was needed. Technological advances in IT, typesetting and print have since allowed the amendment process to be streamlined and improved.
In 1994 the Print on Demand (PoD) printing system was introduced allowing the printing and delivery of individual copies of standards in response to an individual order. Amendments could now be incorporated into the base standard to produce a consolidated edition whenever needed.
This system enabled changes to be shown but only for the latest amendment. If a standard was amended twice or more before the issue of a new (revised) version then the sidelines indicating the previous amendment were lost and new sidelines indicated changes introduced by the next amendment. Changes introduced by any previous amendment were invisible.
Current situation
From 2000, the current system of tagging amendments using new features has been used. This system has several advantages over the previous implementation methods. The tagging system makes it possible to identify individual changes in the standard introduced by a succession of different amendments.
The start and finish of text introduced or altered by amendment is now indicated in the text by tags. Tags indicating changes to text carry the number of the amendment.
This is true for all amendments issued by BSI whether they originate from BSI, CEN, CENELEC, ISO or IEC - a key piece of value added information for BSI issued documents.
A further feature of the BSI tagging system is to indicate "common modifications" using tags. Common modifications, known as "common mods" occur only in European electrical standards when CENELEC considers it necessary to introduce supplementary information or to change information given in the corresponding IEC standard.
A table listing all amendments to existing current standards is always given on the inside front cover, indicating the issue date.
So, it can be seen that the way in which amendments are provided to BSI users has vastly improved over the last ten years. The current tagging system gives the user the capability of identifying where individual changes to the content of the standard occurred and when this change was introduced. This gives the user a full history of the development of the current edition of any standard in BSI's collection.
