Indexes and informational guides to the literature within the field of Urban Studies and Planning lack consistency and are severely outdated. Historical bibliographic guides do not adequately reflect the composition and forms of material currently being produced within this field. With the dissolution of the Council of Planning Librarians in 2000, the history and accessibility to planning reports, pamphlets, documents and drawings are being lost. What was once in the realm of accessibility is entering the arena of grey literature. George Bestor and Holway Jones, published "City Planning: A Basic Bibliography of Sources and Trend" in 1962. Gale Research Company's "Urban Planning: a Guide to Information Sources" was published in 1979. Each gives a great sense of the breadth and depth of material and formats encompassed by the field; neither predicted nor anticipated the advent of geographical information systems [GIS], cd-roms, or electronic databases and records management systems. Fortunately, each gives physical locations of planning material throughout the United States. Urban Studies is a unique discipline in that a significant amount of the primary literature is produced by non-profit or government agencies that do not publish or actively promote the sale of their literature. Scholars, researchers, and practitioners must develop strategic searching skills and an "information network" to identify and access the desired material. This presentation will trace the history of Urban Planning Libraries within the United States, discussing their classification schemes and collections, and assess the current status of indexes and informational guides. The assessment will be conducted through a variety of means: development of a Web survey for staff within urban planning material depositories, written and verbal communications with librarians and reference managers, and research aimed at identifying planning libraries established after 1980, the date of the Gale's guide. Based upon communications with other university librarians at schools with Urban Studies/Planning departments, the literature currently being produced by faculty or in collaboration with city, county, state and national governments may lack a consistent index basis. Given that current planning documents and data are born digital what national standard [MARC, AACR2, EAD or FGDC] for indexing, online retrieval and resource sharing is being used? Worse, older material currently in collections, theoretically available for use, is inaccessible due to archaic or obsolete cataloging schemes. Better approaches to collecting, indexing and providing access to information will be recommended. The long-term goal of this project is to make it easier for planners, researchers and practitioners, to locate key documents and data. Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notes, Pratt student commentary XA International