ABSTRACT
The authors and publishers are not responsible for the contents or reliability of the linked web sites and do not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. Listing should not be taken as endorsement of any kind. We cannot guarantee that these links will work all the time and we have no control over the availability of the linked pages. For this chapter of the book, a less formal style has been chosen, speaking directly to you, the student. Today using the internet for access to legislation,
standards and guidance is universal and of great benefit to the international occupational health and safety (OHS) practitioner or person seeking information. Clearly there are many organisations that give small amounts of information free in order to gain your membership or custom. As internet users know, documents, guidance, reports, etc. can remain sitting on web sites for years. So it is very important to ensure that they are up to date and authoritative. Guidance from good reliable sources is usually kept up to date and often states the date on which the site was last updated. Fortunately in the OHS field there are many organi-
sations that freely allow the download of information because they are either governments, government funded or have a strong wish to make good guidance widely available. These include IOSH, RoSPA and many similar OHS organisations around the world; government departments in the US, UK Europe and beyond; universities and local authorities. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has recently decided to allow free download of most of their extensive, authoritative and well-produced guidance. This is a significant change of policy and provides a wealth of information for the OHS practitioner and others. Finding these sources of information and getting the
best results from your searches can be a daunting task. The following general guidance may help when searching for occupational, safety, health, fire, chemical and environmental information on the internet. The web sites are mainly in English but some are also in several other languages or a local language and English. There is also a very useful free, UK Open University,
9-hour introductory course, Finding information in information technology and computing, LIB 5 at: https://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2370
17.2.1 The key to successful searching Remember, you are smarter than a computer. Use your intelligence. Search engines are fast, but dumb. A search engine’s ability to understand what you want
is very limited. It will obediently look for occurrences of your keywords all over the Web, but it doesn’t understand what your keywords mean or why they’re important to you. To a search engine, a keyword is just a string of characters. It doesn’t know the difference between cancer the crab and cancer the disease … and it doesn’t care. But you know what your query means (at least, we
hope you do!). Therefore, you must supply the brains. The search engine will supply the raw computing power.
