A standard is a document written by a standards organization whose mission is to prepare technical or other instructions for doing something. Standards are the technical norm or method of doing something.  In the security field we work regularly with standards that pertain to health and safety, deal with the disabled, with door and hardware, security and fire. Some standards are adopted by cities and states as codes or laws.

There are several very common sets of standards that we deal with. The most common is the fire standards published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). We can’t provide copies on this website due to copyright restrictions but a special section of this website which deals exclusively with fire issues addresses the various fire standards that should be part of every museum security professional’s bookshelf or museum’s library.

Similarly, the Underwriters’ Laboratories (UL) standards play an important role in museum security and these, too, are protected by copyright but can be obtained from their authors. Generally, you don’t need to buy UL standards. There are too many of them and they are largely irrelevant to your day to day duties. Just know that any security systems that you use must be UL “listed” for their purpose.  This means that if an access control system is UL “listed” for access control but not for burglar alarm monitoring, you can’t use it in your museum for alarm monitoring and if a smoke detector is UL listed for mounting on a ceiling, you can’t mount it on the wall. UL is an organization operated by the insurance industry that assures that security and fire equipment functions as it should.

NFPA 101 is the Life Safety Code. Some municipalities have adopted it and others have adopted more stringent requirements. The primary contact we have with this document involves using delay locking devices on doors out of your museum. This document gives all of the requirements in order to be allowed to use delay locks and defines how long the doors can be delayed before the must open. The section that pertains to 99% of all museum contacts with this code is “Special Locking Devices”. You can get a copy from the NFPA. See the referrals page of this website.

The most important standard for museum security is the “Recommended Guidelines for Museum Security” (later re-titled as the “Suggested Practices in Museum Security”) which is not officially a standard. Nevertheless, it is extremely important to you and you should not only have a copy of it on your bookshelf, you should adopt this document and work toward total compliance.