The First Data Release of the KODIAQ Survey
  We present and make publicly available the first data release (DR1) of the
Keck Observatory Database of Ionized Absorption toward Quasars (KODIAQ) survey.
The KODIAQ survey is aimed at studying galactic and circumgalactic gas in
absorption at high-redshift, with a focus on highly-ionized gas traced by OVI,
using the HIRES spectrograph on the Keck-I telescope. KODIAQ DR1 consists of a
fully-reduced sample of 170 quasars at 0.29 < z_em < 5.29 observed with HIRES
at high resolution (36,000 <= R <= 103,000) between 2004 and 2012. DR1 contains
247 spectra available in continuum normalized form, representing a sum total
exposure time of ~1.6 megaseconds. These co-added spectra arise from a total of
567 individual exposures of quasars taken from the Keck Observatory Archive
(KOA) in raw form and uniformly processed using a HIRES data reduction package
made available through the XIDL distribution. DR1 is publicly available to the
community, housed as a higher level science product at the KOA. We will provide
future data releases that make further QSOs, including those with pre-2004
observations taken with the previous-generation HIRES detectors.
