Introducing SRHD Library

Finding a building product is rarely just a technical exercise.

A product might satisfy the relevant performance requirements, but architecture also depends on colour, texture, finish, scale and how products work together visually. Making a good product decision often means considering technical and visual information at the same time.

That is one of the reasons we created SRHD Library — a new, free building product library designed specifically for architects.

But there were a few other problems we wanted to solve too.

Searching more of the market

Traditional building product libraries are generally commercial platforms.

That creates an understandable limitation: the products available to search are usually determined, at least in part, by which suppliers have chosen to pay to participate.

For an architect, that can mean you are not really searching the building product market. You are searching the portion of the market represented within that particular platform.

Our ambition with SRHD Library is different.

We want to build as broad an index of Australian building products as we reasonably can, regardless of whether the supplier is a commercial client of Spec Rep Help Desk.

The aim is not to decide which product you should specify. It is to make it much easier to discover the products that exist.

More visual ways to search

Sometimes you know exactly what you are looking for.

Sometimes you don't.

You might know that you need a brick in a particular colour range, a tile that works with a material palette, or a paint colour somewhere between two shades.

SRHD Library therefore includes visual search tools alongside conventional text and category search.

For example, you can search paints, bricks and tiles using a Photoshop-style colour picker rather than trying to describe a colour in words.

This is an important part of what we think an architectural product library should be.

Building products are technical objects, but they are also design materials.

Projects and Palettes

Creating a free SRHD Library account also gives you tools to organise the products you discover.

Products can be saved into Projects or Palettes.

A Project represents an architectural project — perhaps a house, school, apartment building or commercial project.

A Palette is more flexible. It might contain the finishes for a bathroom, a façade material selection, an overall colour scheme or a group of products you simply think work well together.

A Project can contain multiple Palettes.

And a Palette can also be used across multiple Projects.

We think this distinction matters because architects don't always organise product knowledge according to individual jobs. Good material combinations, details and product groups often become part of a practice's broader design knowledge.

Over time, we want SRHD Library to help make that knowledge easier to build and reuse.

An index, rather than a replacement for the source

Despite the name, SRHD Library is perhaps better understood as an index.

One of our most important design principles is that the supplier remains the authoritative source for information about their product.

Wherever possible, Library does not simply send you to a supplier's homepage and leave you to spend another 20 minutes finding the product.

We endeavour to link directly to the exact supplier webpage where that product is published.

That means SRHD Library can help you discover and narrow down products, while making it easy to return to the original source and verify the current technical information for yourself.

This is especially important in an environment where product information changes, certifications expire, technical literature is updated and AI-generated answers should never become a substitute for checking authoritative source material.

AI where it is useful

SRHD Library also connects product discovery with some of the other tools within the Spec Rep Help Desk ecosystem.

The AI Ribbon can help you investigate questions around NCC requirements or sustainability while you are browsing products.

The Planning Desk provides fast assistance with Australian town planning questions.

And the wider Spec Rep Help Desk network can connect product discovery with supplier AI Spec Reps, certification information and other specialist sources.

The intention is not to make every interaction an AI interaction.

Sometimes the best interface is a search box.

Sometimes it is a colour picker.

Sometimes it is a product card.

And sometimes it is a conversation.

The important thing is using the right interface for the problem.

Building towards AI-assisted specification

Projects and Palettes also provide some of the foundations for where we think this system can go next.

We see them as prerequisites for a future AI-assisted specification authoring tool.

If an architect has already selected products, organised palettes, gathered project information and investigated relevant technical requirements, much of the information needed to begin assembling a specification already exists.

AI should be able to help turn that structured project knowledge into a specification much more efficiently — while keeping the architect in control of what is ultimately documented and specified.

Library is therefore not simply another way to browse products.

It is part of a broader attempt to rethink how architects discover, assess, organise and eventually specify building products.

And it is free

We called it Library deliberately.

And, like all good public libraries, SRHD Library is free to use.

You can explore the Library, create an account, build Projects and Palettes, and start discovering products today.