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INTRODUCTION TO THE MATERIALS STANDARDS PDF COMPILATION ● 40TH EDITION, RELEASE 1 (APRIL 2020)

Overall Organization, Release Schedule, and Subject Areas

The Standard Specifications for Transportation Materials and Methods of Sampling and Testing, and Provisional Standards are updated annually in three release groups, broken up by the subject areas stewarded by the technical subcommittees responsible for its content. The transition to three release groups a year occurred in 2016 with the 36th Edition. Releases 1 through 3 occur in April, June, and July, respectively, covering the following subjects:

• Release 1-Hydraulic Cement and Lime; Fresh Concrete; Hardened Concrete; Pavement Measurement; Bridge and Pavement Preservation; and Quality Assurance and Environmental.

• Release 2-General Manufactured Materials.

• Release 3-Geotechnical; and Bituminous Materials and Mixtures.

Within each release, the standards are divided into three parts. Part 1 contains Specifications and Practices for materials; Part 2 includes methods of testing and specifications for testing equipment, many of which contain both U.S. Customary and Metric units of measure; and Part 3 contains provisional specifications, practices, and tests. A number of standards were included in this publication at the request of the AASHTO Committee on Bridges and Structures.

In 2016-2019, the standards were published in electronic form only: as a web-based compilation and as individual standard PDF downloads. In 2020, web-based compilation was discontinued in favor of producing release-based PDF compilations, which were now practical due to emerging developments in PDF technical functionality. Archived compilations of the 34th through 39th Editions are available on AASHTO's Store at. Please note that while the table of contents for each compilation lists only the standards included in that release, a master table of contents is available on the Store.