Specialised Water and Sanitation Databases

By using a search engine you might not be able to retrieve information stored in a database. Therefore it is good to check the databases separately when searching for specific information. We have selected the following databases that provide free access to water and sanitation information. The databases are divided into:

• bibliographic databases
• organisation directories
• statistics
• legislation
• equipment or products.

Databases have the following advantages compared to search engines.

• They give access to specialized collections
• They provide advanced search options
• It implies quality control
• They give access to (part of the) “Invisible web” (that is: those parts of the web, which are not accessible through a search engine).

There are also some disadvantages in using databases:

• Often the access to databases is slow(er), compared to HTML web sites
• Currency (update frequency), might be a problem
• Many databases have access restrictions (passwords, members only)
• Multi-database searching needs special software