A city Resource Directory (CRD) for the smart video surveillance system offers enhanced security for citizens. With a growing need for public security and safety, video enabled devices are a common sight in private and public locations around the world. They are however isolated systems, and unless owned by the government, there is no means to intelligently confirm their existence or benefit from their activities, at the public level. We propose a citywide surveillance directory system to support and facilitate the cataloguing, accessing, managing and administration of the video surveillance networks. To demonstrate the our work, we developed a simulation project in which resource directories designated for specific cities were used to administer local surveillance systems and we demonstrate how a surveillance system registers with only the appropriate CRD in its local city. We demonstrated how our solution manages failed nodes during the registration process of cameras joining the CRD.