IIW History 1990-2015

Director of the French Institute, to be elected to the new post in the Science and Technical Secretariat run by the Institut de Soudure. 6 Strategically, this was an excellent move since France already held the Secretariat for ISO/TC 44. In addition, Leroy was the first Chair of ISO/TC 44, as well as being Chair of Commission VII Standardisation (C-VII), which was a guarantee of effective liaison between both organisations. 7 It is to be noted that, following an earlier agreement with ISO, C-VII, in fact, was actually established to provide the basis of collaboration between IIW and ISO in the first place, particularly since the majority of members of ISO/TC 44 were members of C-VII. Leroy was in a unique position which ensured that ISO received the technical information needed from IIW and that IIW material was incorporated into ISO standards. Leroy was then to serve in that post for 24 years until he relinquished his position as Chair of C-VII and was replaced by Mr Henry Granjon in 1974. Mr Marcel Evrard then replaced Leroy as Chair of ISO/TC 44, altering the close relationship that had previously existed between ISO/TC 44 and C-VII. Prior to Granjon’s replacement of Leroy, C-VII had been amalgamated with another commission, Commission IV Documentation (C-IV), in 1967 to form Commission VII Documentation and Standardisation (C-VII). IIW then formed a Select Committee Standardisation (SC- STAND) in 1976, at the General Assembly in Sydney, Australia under the Chairmanship of Granjon. This was to be renamed as the Board of Directors Working Group Standardisation (WG-STAND) in 2007. ISO was born from the union of two separate organisations. One was the International Federation of the National Standardization Association (ISA) established in NewYork in 1926 and the other was the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee established in 1944 and administered from London. With regard to ISO, the basic idea of post-war international standardisation was to evolve international standards from those that had already been developed nationally and then to re-implement them back at a national level as ISO standards. 8 By the late 1960s, the emphasis would change from utilising national standards to directly developing international standards. 9 For a number of years, considerable concerns were expressed to ISO from industry due to the length of time that it took to produce a standard. Prof. Anders Thor, the Swedish Secretary of two ISO committees, said that ‘the story of attempts to speed-up the production of international standards is one of moving bottle-necks’. The underlying issue, in all reality, was that ‘demand was exceeding supply’. 10 In respect to Thor’s comments, a study was to ‘reveal a “shocking” fact that the average time for preparing an international standard was calculated at seven years’. 11 Conscious of the significant expertise within IIW and the high number of documents produced by the Institute that had been submitted for publication through ISO in recent years, ISO established a new category of international standardising bodies in 1984

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