Abstract
As the National Metrology Institute (NMI) for the United States, NIST, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, has provided measurement services, both calibrations and reference materials, for more than 100 years. Through these services, our customers have benefitted from our measurement capabilities and expertise in many areas, including amount of substance, dimensional, electricity and magnetism; ionizing radiation; mass and related quantities; photometry and radiometry; thermodynamic; and time and frequency. NISTs customers have also had access to some of the lowest measurement uncertainties available and a dependable way to establish traceability to the International System of units (SI) [
http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/metric/si-units.cfm]. In response to the signing of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA), NIST first established an institution-wide quality system for the measurement services 10 years ago [
http://www.bipm.org/en/cipm-mra/objectives.html]. NISTs Quality System for Measurement Services has advanced the quality of service and measurement we provide our customers by fostering an environment in which NIST management and staff to work towards continual improvement in the development and delivery of NIST measurement services. This paper describes NISTs Quality System for the Measurement Services and its relevance to international standards of quality, such as the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 17025 standard and ISO Guide 34 [
http://www.nist.gov/nistqs/]. It also provides a history of this quality system and a glimpse of future goals for improving its implementation.