Organising Local Documentation Services for the Water and Sanitation Sector: guidelines

Updated - Friday 01 September 2006

IRC (2005)

Meeting the need for information on water supply and sanitation

Millions of people lack the safe drinking water and basic sanitation which are essential to human health and wellbeing; yet water and sanitation specialists and many local communities have considerable experience in setting up and maintaining low-cost water supply and sanitation systems. If others are to benefit from this experience, information about these technologies, and their application in different situations, needs to be made available.

To help ensure that such information is collected and made available to those who need it, the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, in collaboration with its partners in the South and with the support of the Netherlands Government, is working to build the capacity of water and sanitation resource centres in developing countries through its Resource Centre Development Programme. These guidelines are published as a contribution to that Programme.

Second edition

The first edition of these guidelines was published in 1993. Like the first edition, these revised guidelines concentrate on the basic tasks needed to set up and operate a small documentation centre at the local level. The first edition was ‘based on the assumption that, in most cases, such a centre will not have access to a computer’; it therefore concentrated mainly on manual techniques and processes.

This second edition has been revised to take account of the developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) which have revolutionised information provision during the past ten years. The revised guidelines continue to cover manual systems, but also include more detailed guidance on computer applications and access to the Internet.

Target audience

These guidelines are addressed to:

managers of local water supply and sanitation units who have decided to set up or improve a local documentation centre
professional or technical staff members acting as the supervisor of such a centre
clerical or secretarial staff members responsible for the operation of such a centre

The guidelines aim to help these three kinds of people to understand how to organise collections of documents in their institutions in such a way as to be able to find information quickly and easily, without the help of a professional librarian or documentalist.

Prepared on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme-World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme in support of its International Training Network (ITN). Also available in Spanish [RS 9-S]. Please note that the Spanish edition is not revised yet.

This publication is also free available in PDF format. You can either download the whole document, or each chapter separately at the bottom of this page.