I am currently looking at subscribing to one of the commercially available online H&S information services. They appear to widely vary in cost and content. I'm currently taking a detailed look at Barbour and Croner i H&S 'Expert'. Can anyone give me their thoughts as to the pro's and con's on either of these that they may have used. To avoid any potential issues with breaching AUG's, perhaps private messaging might be best, unless one of the moderators could advise otherwise. Thank you.

Many thanks for your input Steve, much appreciated. Mike

Barbour and IHS (Previously Technical Indexes) offer full text documents/information of a very wide range of health and Safety and related topics. They also offer a suite of guidance from industry organisations--some of which can be very useful and at times is the only guidance available. They also offer, at an extra cost a suite of British Standards related to health and safety. They also offer additional modules for very extensive and detailed guidance on Fire, Environmental, Chemical and other topics--all as original documents. There is also an alert service whose frequency is user determined. Croner is not an original document service, but re-written compilation of various for a comprehensive set of topics in a more user friendly format. However, it does not include full text documents except it used to have a very small collection when I last tried it out. Now that almost all HSE ACoPs and guidance is freely available, unless you need that industry guidance and British Standards, it may not be value for money for the full document services from Barbour or IHS. The choice depends upon what your information requirements are and how frequently you estimate its use.

We currently use IHS, but are currently reviewing our options. When asking for quotes, ask for a price with & without British Standards, as there is a large cost difference! This can work out quite expensive if you do not use BS's on a regular basis, & if you do have to occasionally refer to them, your local library will almost certainly be able to assist you free of charge!!

you should be able to check out BS etc for your 'personal' use via your local library and I have used TI for a long time with few problems