Not long ago, a long-time reader called to ask how to find a certain maintenance management article on our Web site www.mt-online.com. He was unable to find it and told me the search capabilities on our site left a lot to be desired. As it turned out, the article was published before our Web site went up, so the article wasn't posted.

 

His situation illustrates one of the problems of getting information. Resources are extensive, but not always available via the Internet, and your thought process may be different than the people doing the indexing and assigning keywords for the retrieval system. And that system may not be intuitive.

As far as our site is concerned, we simply group articles by subject categories: maintenance management, predictive maintenance, shaft alignment, etc. A visitor enters the site, clicks "Articles Online" on the left column, selects the general topic, and scans the titles and descriptive paragraphs to select the article.

As an example, in "Is Streamlined RCM Worth the Risk?" in this issue, author John Moubray refers to an article in another magazine written by Dana Netherton about SAE's RCM Standard. If you remembered that MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY magazine had carried two articles by Netherton shortly before the ratification of the RCM Standard, you could read them online by visiting the "Articles Online" section of www.mt-online.com and clicking maintenance management and scanning down until the article information comes into view and then clicking on the article title.

The article also can be found using Internet search facilities. The one I use most often is Alta Vista. Entering reliability centered maintenance netherton brings up 3,264,604 hits. Using the Alta Vista's advance search capability and entering text:reliability centered maintenance and text:netherton brings up 5961 hits, the top three being Netherton's company home page and the two articles.

The search can be limited to the MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY site by adding and host:mt-online.com as an additional search parameter. Now, only the two articles appear.

Not everything is available on the Internet. In our case, we have lots of older articles, including three by Moubray on "Redefining Maintenance" listed in our index. To get the index, go to www.mt-online.com and click on "Index" in the box in the upper right corner of the home page. The index is available as a Microsoft Word file or an Adobe Acrobat file.

Index entries, grouped by subject, include title, author, and issue, and cover a host of "Golden Oldies." MT