CIS is pleased to announce that the English version of the ILO Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety and the CISDOC bibliographic database on OSH are available to the world for free on the ILO Web site. Internauts are invited to point their browsers at www.ilo.org/encyclopaedia/ and www.ilo.org/dyn/cisdoc/index_html.

Now in its fourth edition, the Encyclopaedia is a unique and widely respected reference. Its 1000 articles and copious illustrations have been available on paper, CD-ROM and the World Wide Web since 1998. But always at a price. Responding to calls from International Labour Conference Delegates and the ILO Governing Body to provide free access to more resources, the Programme on Safety and Health at Work and the Environment (SafeWork) has now made the Encyclopaedia the centrepiece of its "SafeWork Bookshelf", which presently also includes the ILO/WHO/UNEP International Chemical Safety Cards.

CISDOC is the fruit of 30 years of screening the occupational safety and health literature of the world for interesting and useful books, articles and audiovisual materials that occupational safety and health specialists can use in their fight against workplace accidents and diseases. It already guides users to over 62,000 publications, and 2000 more references are added every year.

An important tool is included with the Encyclopaedia and CISDOC: the CIS Thesaurus. This trilingual (English/French/Spanish) collection of terms is used by the ILO to index CISDOC references, and by a number of occupational safety and health libraries around the world to organize their collections. In the Internet age, it is a valuble source of "meta-data" for making Web pages easier to find.