Safeguarding Old and New Journal Tables for the VO: Status for Extragalactic and Radio Data

Independent of established data centers, and partly for my own research, since 1989 I have been collecting the tabular data from over 2600 articles concerned with radio sources and extragalactic objects in general. Optical character recognition (OCR) was used to recover tables from 740 papers. Tables from only 41 percent of the 2600 articles are available in the CDS or CATS catalog collections, and only slightly better coverage is estimated for the NED database. This fraction is not better for articles published electronically since 2001. Both object databases (NED, SIMBAD, LEDA) as well as catalog browsers (VizieR, CATS) need to be consulted to obtain the most complete information on astronomical objects. More human resources at the data centers and better collaboration between authors, referees, editors, publishers, and data centers are required to improve data coverage and accessibility. The current efforts within the Virtual Observatory (VO) project, to provide retrieval and analysis tools for different types of published and archival data stored at various sites, should be balanced by an equal effort to recover and include large amounts of published data not currently available in this way.

Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in Data Science Journal, vol. 8 (2009), http://dsj.codataweb.org; presented at Special Session "Astronomical Data and the Virtual Observatory" on the conference "CODATA 21", Kiev, Ukraine, October 5-8, 2008