The Internet is a great source of information about occupational safety and health, which can be found in many websites belonging to safety and health organizations, unions, government agencies and universities.

But the information can be difficult to find, because the internet can be a confusing and intimidating place. This page is intended as a guide that will help the beginner get started, and also help experienced surfers find what they are looking for with speed and ease.

A place to start

The website you are viewing now is a good place to begin a search for safety and health information. Our site map will lead you to pages of valuable information in this site, and our home page is an excellent gateway to safety and health information on the entire internet. (If you are an internet novice, please note: if you follow any of the links in this page to another page, you can return here by clicking on your browser's "back" button.)

This website includes a collection of factsheets on workplace hazards and extensive information on the safety and health rights of workers. There are pages of safety and health news, information about the OSHA ergonomics standard and about the national campaign for safe needles and a list (with e-mail links) of more than 30 local committees for occupational safety and health and similar organizations in the U.S. and Canada.

We have more than 70 pages of carefully chosen links to other websites concerning specific occupational and environmental safety and health topics, arranged by topic. All of those pages are listed in the site map. Some of the sites listed in our Resources and Links page are highly specialized, such as the Carbonless Copy Paper Injury and Information Network. Others sites, such as OSHWEB are extremely diverse. Such multi-issue sites are listed in our list of links under the category "Occupational Safety and Health, Industrial Hygiene."

All about PDF (Portable Document Format)files

When you are looking for information in this site and elsewhere on the internet, you will often encounter the PDF icon -- -- or a note that a file is "in PDF format." You need a copy of the "Adobe Acrobat Reader" program in your computer to open a PDF file. If you don't have the software, you will need to download it, free, from the Adobe website. It is a very useful program, essential to anyone who makes regular use of the internet.

It is highly recommended that when you access a PDF file, you "RIGHT Click" on the link (instead of the normal LEFT Click) and save the file directly to a folder and filename on your hard drive. If you LEFT Click on the link, the PDF file will open immediately on-screen, which will frequently result in technical difficulties and the need for multiple download attempts. If you save the file to your hard drive, you can open it at any time later, on-line or off.

For answers to frequently asked questions about Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here, or to download Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here.

Specialized websites

Some internet sites specialize in providing information about specific hazards. For example, the New Jersey Department of Health Hazardous Substance Fact Sheet Collection includes more than 1,600 clear, concise fact sheets about toxics, listed alphabetically. Another source of information about a long list of toxics is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) collection of International Chemical Safety Cards. We list these and similar sites under the heading "Chemical hazards, toxic substances, and Pesticides."

OSHA's website

Another excellent source of information about specific hazards is the OSHA website, which includes a subject index that lists, in addition to chemical hazards, a wide variety of physical and other hazards, including heat stress, ionizing radiation and workplace violence. To find information in the OSHA site about subjects that are not listed in the index, there is a search page, which makes it possible to find every document in the OSHA website that contains any word or set of words. The OSHA subject index and the search page can be accessed from almost anywhere in the OSHA website, by clicking on "Index" or "Search" in the top right corner of each page.

In addition to information about specific hazards, the OSHA website is the place to look for federal health and safety regulations, safety and health statistics, lists of publications available by mail, and news about governmental safety and health policy. A recent addition to the OSHA website is called the "Workers' Page" with useful information about safety and health rights, how to file an OSHA complaint, and an OSHA complaint form that can be filed over the internet.

Finding detailed inspection and violation information

One of the most intriguing parts of the OSHA website is its database of inspections and citations, where you can obtain OSHA data concerning inspections and citations of a specific employer, a specific industry, or within a particular geographic area. OSHA inspection data can be accessed through the OSHA home page by clicking on "Library/Reading Room .... Statistics & Inspection Data," and then on "Establishment Search."

To use the "Establishment Search" form, you type the required information in the blanks, beginning with the "Establishment" (the name of the employer). When doing a search for data about an employer, it is useful to conduct several searches, using variations of the employer's name or the name of a parent company or subsidiary, because the search engine looks for names exactly as they are entered in the database. For example, OSHA has inspection reports listed under "Macy's," and "Macys" (no apostrophe), and "Federated Department Stores -- Macy's." Anyone who wants to see all of them must do a separate search on each variation of the name.

The OSHA search engine often finds inspection reports for employers with names that are similar to the one you are looking for; ask for "Morton" and the search engine finds both "Morton International" and "Lockheed Martin." That is because the OSHA search engine ignores vowels – "Morton" and "Martin" are identical, as far as the search program is concerned.

The OSHA inspection database can also be searched by industrial sector, as codified by Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. The U.S. Commerce Department assigns every employer a 4-digit SIC code, based on the nature of the business. You can search for very narrow groups of businesses by using all four digits of the SIC code, or you can search over wider industrial groups by using only the first two or three digits of the SIC code.

For example, you can search within a narrow group, such as the companies that manufacture industrial gases, by using SIC Code 2813. You can widen the search to include all the manufacturers of industrial inorganic chemicals by dropping the last digit and searching on 281. You can widen the search still farther by dropping the second-to-last digit and searching on 28, which encompasses the entire chemical industry. You can widen the search to cover all manufacturing companies, by using the letter "D" instead of a number. To learn the SIC code of a particular industry, or the letter that stands for each of the ten major industry groups, click on "SIC" on the left side of the "Inspections within SIC" page.

As useful as the OSHA inspection database is, it is not complete, because the site is never completely up to date and because it contains some errors such as misspelled company names (a misspelled name can make a record extremely difficult to find) and incorrect SIC codes. You should not assume that you will find all the relevant and current OSHA inspection data there, even after a thorough search of the website. If complete data is required, you need to contact OSHA directly and make an information request.

Union websites

The safety and health pages of some union websites can also be very useful. For example, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) website includes a detailed safety and health manual that you can download, Safe Jobs Now: An AFSCME Guide to Health and Safety in the Workplace, plus a large collection of fact sheets and other practical information. The Communications Workers of America has four self-teaching tutorials on their website, with introductions to "Researching Your Employer's Compliance History," "Researching Toxic Chemicals at Work," "Researching Chemicals in Your Neighborhood," and "Researching Disability Issues."

Another useful group of websites are those belonging to universities, which often include many pages of safety and health information, such as the University of Maryland's Department of Environmental Safety and the University of Iowa's Hardin MetaDirectory of Occupational and Environmental Health.

Listservs are another valuable source of information on the internet. A listserv is an electronic mailing list, which distributes e-mail messages to everyone who is on the list. Some listservs are interactive, meaning that anyone who is on the listserv can send e-mail messages that go to everyone else on the list. Others are more like traditional mailing lists; everyone on the list receives e-mail is addressed to the list, but only the list sponsor can post messages.

Most listservs are available for the asking, and they are usually easy to quit, so it is a good practice to enroll in any listserv that might be useful and then quit if it doesn't live up to expectations. Two excellent safety and health listservs are the NYCOSH Update on Safety and Health and the Occupational and Environmental Medicine listserve of the Duke University Medical Center Department of Community and Family Medicine.

Happy surfing!