welcome

May 2008 - 'Transitional Settlement and Reconstruction after Natural Disasters' (United Nations, 2008) field edition guidelines have been officially published with the occasion of the Shelter Meeting (SM08a). They are a joint publication of the Shelter Centre and UN/OCHA published by the UN. Further details are also available on the UN/OCHA web site.

May 2008 - 'Humanitarian timber (draft)' (UN/OCHA, IFRC & CARE International, 2008) is the latest draft of the guidelines on the procurement and use of timber in humanitarian response. Further details are also available on the Humanitarian timber web site.

May 2008 - The 2007 Annual Report of Shelter Centre has now been published and is available to download from the Shelter Library. Click here to view it online or to download a PDF copy.

May 2008 - 'NRC Camp Management Toolkit 2008' (NRC/Camp Management Project, 2008) provides relevant and constructive reference and practical support for national and international humanitarian staff, community leaders and authorities, IDPs and refugees involved in camp management and camp operations.

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^ what is Shelter Library?

Shelter Library is a free service supporting and informing good practice by humanitarian organisations responding to the transitional settlement and shelter needs of populations affected by conflict and natural disasters.

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^ how to use Shelter Library

The menu to the left offers six ways to find material in Shelter Library:

1. use the keyword search by entering a keyword into the 'search' box

2. develop a more detailed search using many criteria by selecting the 'search options' option

3. browse the authors of material by selecting the authors option

4. browse the publishers of material by selecting the publishers option

5. browse from the categories listed on the left, such as 'displacement' and 'guidelines' - you will find the same documents appearing in a number of these categories, in order to improve navigation.

6. for the online version of Shelter Library, it is also possible to use the deep search function, which is still being tested. This function looks for words inside the documents, using the Google search engine, which makes a cache of the website that is updated fortnightly.

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^ copyright information

Shelter Centre has been granted permission by the following publishers to post documents on both the online (www.shelterlibrary.org) and CD resource versions of Shelter Library. The copyrights remain with the publishers of the documents:

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR)
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN/OCHA)

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF-International)
Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)
Oxfam GB
The Sphere Project

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has requested that copyright information be included on the page relating to each entry of its publications, and those of its affiliated organisations, the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) and the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN).

Shelter Centre has made efforts to ensure that it meets the copyright requirements of the organisations producing the documents that are available in the Shelter Library. If, for any reason, organisations would like to prevent the use of their documents, they are requested to email secretariat@sheltercentre.org.

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^ about Shelter Library

Shelter Library is maintained by Shelter Centre and its volunteer team, which will continually add material to the online version of Shelter Library (www.shelterlibrary.org). If you are aware of any material that can be shared freely that you consider ought to be added to this site, please make your proposal to library@sheltercentre.org.

The Shelter Library resource is available on-line as a website and off-line as a CD-ROM, distributed with the guidelines 'Transitional Settlement: Displaced Populations', published in 2005 by Oxfam Publications. These guidelines were developed by the University of Cambridge shelterproject as part of a project funded by DFID .