How Complete is the Electronic Catalogue Archive at CDS in the Extragalactic Domain?

Abstract

From the literature of 1987 to 1993 a representative sample was prepared of 500 papers with tabular information for >~50 supposedly extragalactic objects each. Regardless of their scientific value, but corrected for redundancy, these papers contain 842,000 entries. For the 374 papers with >100 entries each, the CDS FTP-archive of catalogues contains tables for 21 % of them, increasing from 11 % for 1987 to 29 % for 1993. The coverage in terms of entries is much higher, and half of all papers with >1500 entries are in the archive. Valuable and/or large data sets are identified among the missing ones. Some of these can be found in other archives, and it is argued that tabular material published in future should be preserved more systematically in a collaborative effort between authors, journal editors and data centres.