ICE Library staff have produced this guide to sources of information about water supply, water resources and water management, concentrating on UK and US sources.
Books, design guidance and specifications
Water supply by A C Twort (6th ed., 2009) has been the standard textbook in the field for several decades but most of the major commercial publishers produce books on this topic, including Taylor and Francis (CRC Press), John Wiley, Springer and McGraw Hill.
In addition, ICE and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publish technical books, in electronic form as well as print, as does the International Water Association (IWA). The IWA has strong interests in management, policy and operational issues too.
Some of these publications may double as design guidance, such as ICE'sFloods and reservoir safety (3rd ed., 1996) or the ASCE’s Manuals of Practice.
Reports from the Construction Industry Research and Information Association may be appropriate and often describe best practice.
The American Water Works Association publishes something like 60 manuals related to water supply, alongside standards and a major work entitled Standard methods for examination of water and wastewater, used to aid biological and chemical analysis.
Standards in the UK are published by the British Standards Institution and a list of the most relevant ones appears in the Civil engineering specification for the water industry (7th ed., 2011). The latter is produced by the Water Research Centre, which publishes a variety of codes of practice, guidance manuals and specifications on pipes and mains, particularly for their assessment, rehabilitation and repair.
The British equivalent of the methods of examination of water was issued in the past by the Department of the Environment and is now freely downloadable from the Environment Agency’s website.
The Department for International Development has published a guidance manual on water supply and sanitation programmes, applicable to developing countries, which can be freely accessed via the above link.
Loughborough University’s Water, Engineering and Development Centre also issues advice and guidance for schemes in low income countries, again much of it freely available after registration on its website. Similarly, the Guidelines for drinking water quality, published by the World Health Organisation, can be downloaded by all.
Technical papers (journals and conferences)
Good sources for technical papers on many aspects of water supply, water resources and water management are:
The links above should take you to online search engines for the journals, although the ICE Proceedings is best searched through the Virtual Library and the ASCE journals through the Civil engineering database.
The latter will also identify papers from ASCE conferences on water-related themes, of which it organizes many.
The IWA does the same and the issues of the journal Water science and technology are often, in effect, conference proceedings with large numbers of conference papers.
The ICE Virtual Library now includes papers from many ICE conferences, including those organized by the British Dam Society (BDS).
The Society’s earlier conference proceedings (those held from 1975 - 2000) are available for free download on its website but be warned: they come as complete volumes rather than individual papers and so are large files that take a while to download.
Lectures and events
ICE organizes lectures and technical events on water-related themes and current projects, as do the British Dam Society and the British Hydrological Society (BHS). Many are free to attend and can also be viewed remotely, at the time or later, without charge.
They can be found amongst the online lectures or via the websites for the societies (see above).
Both the BDS and BHS have good websites containing lots of information and material. Some can only be accessed by their own members (such as the Bibliography of British dams, for example).
Statutory guidance and/or legal regulations
UK legislation such as Water Acts, as well as regulations published as statutory instruments, can be freely downloaded from a government portal. It includes European directives incorporated into UK law but not the original text of the directives. The latest of these is the Water framework directive.
Further information:
Internationally, issues of policy, strategy and guidance, like climate change and its effect on water resources, are addressed by bodies such as the WHO, UNESCO and the World Bank (the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). Again, many of their publications are available on open access.
Research
The UK government agencies already mentioned will often fund research and will have the resulting documents on open access on their websites.
In addition, research papers are frequently published in the journals cited above, or are presented at conferences. However, there are a number of other bodies that fund research on water topics, or undertake it and publish research reports, including:
Many current research concerns centre on issues of climate change and sustainability.
Statistics, datasets and software
Statistics for water consumption and usage in the UK can be found through searching the website of the Office for National Statistics, and the United Nations and the World Bank are good sources for statistics for other countries.
An Excel spreadsheet of sources of hydrological data can be downloaded from the British Hydrological Society website.
The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology is one of these sources. It hosts the National Water Archive and the National River Flow Archive, as well as offering a range of appropriate software, including some for use with the Flood Estimation Handbook.
Information about historic practice and schemes
The ICE Library retains copies of nineteenth and twentieth century books which describe British practice of the time, including Humber’s work on water supply of towns and cities, earlier editions of Twort’s book on water supply and the manuals on British practice published by the Institution of Water Engineers and Scientists from the 1950s to the 1980s. It will also hold copies of superseded and withdrawn British standards.
The ICE Proceedings are a valuable source of papers about actual projects and schemes, with many of the nineteenth century papers featuring engineering drawings and plans. ICE members can download nineteenth century papers for free via the MyICE section of the website.
Projects and schemes are often commemorated with books or brochures and the Library tries to acquire and keep as many of these as possible.
Another valuable source is the Journal of the Institution of Water Engineers and Scientists. Regrettably, it has neither been digitized nor indexed in the commercially available databases. Manual searching is necessary and is helped by an approximate date of construction of a scheme.
Engineers’ reports, plans and drawings are held in the ICE Archives, too, but such documents are frequently retained by the water companies, consultants or contractors and can be difficult to identify and access. Some are held in public archives such as the National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives or county record offices. The A2A website is one way to locate them.
Dates of construction of schemes (particularly of dams) can be traced through the Register of British Dams and the Bibliography of British Dams, both published by the Building Research Establishment. The latter is electronically accessible via the website of the British Dam Society but only to its own members.
ICOLD’s World Register of Dams performs a similar function for dams in the UK and elsewhere. Formerly printed, it is now purely digital and access has to be purchased.
ICE Library has access and the staff could conduct a search for you. In addition, much of the material cited above will be available in the Library. Members are welcome to visit to use it but, alternatively, it may be possible to borrow or to have the material copied.
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