ABSTRACT
Professionals have a duty to stay up to date with current regulations and codes, current building practices, changes to forms of contract, and developments in materials and products, both new products and those rendered obsolete. Although this may sound a relatively easy thing to do, in practice it presents a series of challenges. The volume of information available to the building designer is vast, each new project bringing with it a new set of challenges and a fresh search for information to answer specific design problems. One of the problems facing many designers is that they do not need to access the information sources all the time. Indeed, many designers work on many different stages of jobs and different projects concurrently, and the physical act of selecting products and specification writing does not take up a great deal of their time. This is particularly so of designers who run a project from inception to completion, mainly those self employed and working in small offices and/or on small projects. For these individuals, access to information to assist them with the specification writing may only be required every twelve months or so, and then only for a few weeks until the task is complete: they therefore need a reliable and current source of information that can be accessed quickly.
