Information Available on the Net

Newsgroups
One of the key resources is the International brains of others in the field, available via the newsgroups.  As an example we posted a message on this newsgroup, and got a very helpful response from the improbably named Noral B. Stewart. 

There is a downside to obtaining information this way As an example we posted another message on the same newsgroup. We had a reply from a person claiming to be a lecturer in physics at a northern University; he cited a formula which we then used in a report. The only problem was it was the wrong formula.   The moral of the story is when using the internet you must be cautious - Do you trust the site/person providing the information?

Standards, Codes of Practice etc.
Governments and other organisations are rapidly going over to providing their information on the internet. Indeed recent IoA meetings have made use of the internet in their advanced publicity - Nick Antonio for the WHO Guidelines and Stephen Turner in the Mills and Baxter case. In fact it has been policy for the UK  Government to make all House of Lords Judgements available on the Internet as well as legislation, since about 1996, including the Noise Act.

There is a strong case for British Standards being made available in this manner - currently standards are only available online to subscribers.

The DETR has online versions of "Bothered by Noise" and for barking dogs; there are also non-government sites to which residents can be referred. There are also sites such as Swarbrick & Co's site for legal decisions relevant to noise actions, and The Covent Garden Residents' site that gives details on how residents can take Section 82 actions [Broken Link 2008].

Directly Relevant Material 
For Environmental Noise Surveys you often need to know the weather conditions, some time in advance - a call to the Met Office on 0891 500416 (Tel) or 0331 100416 (FaxBack) will provide useful information, at a price.  It is possible to access accurate data for free at the BBC although the Northwest of England does not seem to be recognised by the BBC!!.  Oddly the only place that 10 day forecasts appear to be available is an American site available via here.

If you are in the market for a new sound or vibration meter, the manufacturer's sites can be accessed and browsed via here for noise and here for vibration.  You can also query the oddly named SPLINKS.COM - you can e-mail this UK site with an instrumentation or transducer query and some time later they will reply.  It is not clear who or what SPLINKS is, but the answer can be found be looking up their WHOIS details on a suitable site.

There are sites which provide test data on materials such as absorption coefficients [broken link 8.3.00] and test results for Hand Arm Vibration [Broken 2008] Syndrome and Whole Body Vibration [Broken 2008].

You can subscribe to journals online at Multi Science Publishing and buy acoustics books online here and elsewhere. Yahoo even has an acoustics category. Although much information can be found by using a good search engine such as Google.

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