The guide was prepared in connection with a state-of-the-art survey and literature review on 'Institutions for urban-metropolitan water planning, development and management.' The guide has three objectives: to review developments in information storage and retrieval; to indicate progress being made in developing systems; and to describe available systems which might be of use to investigations into the social science aspects of water. Separate chapters deal respectively with 'general' systems, with discipline oriented systems, and with certain basic bibliographic and other search resources.