The ESO UVES Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample - I. Dataset and New
  N_HI Measurements of Damped Absorbers
  We present here a dataset of quasars observed with the Ultraviolet Visual
Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on the VLT and available in the ESO UVES Advanced
Data Products archive. The sample is made up of a total of 250 high resolution
quasar spectra with emission redshifts ranging from 0.191 < z_em <6.311. The
total UVES exposure time of this dataset is 1560 hours. Thanks to the high
resolution of UVES spectra, it is possible to unambiguously measure the column
density of absorbers with damping wings, down to N_HI > 10^{19} cm^{-2}, which
constitutes the sub-damped Lya absorber (sub-DLA) threshold. Within the
wavelength coverage of our UVES data, we find 150 damped Lya systems
(DLAs)/sub-DLAs in the range 1.5 < z_abs < 4.7. Of these 150, 93 are DLAs and
57 are sub-DLAs. An extensive search in the literature indicates that 6 of
these DLAs and 13 of these sub-DLAs have their N_HI measured for the first
time. Among them, 10 are new identifications as DLAs/sub-DLAs. For each of
these systems, we obtain an accurate measurement of the HI column density and
the absorber's redshift in the range 1.7 < z_abs < 4.2 by implementing a Voigt
profile-fitting algorithm. These absorbers are further confirmed thanks to the
detection of associated metal lines and/or lines from members of the Lyman
series. In our data, a few quasars' lines-of-sight are rich. An interesting
example is towards QSO J0133+0400 (z_em = 4.154) with six DLAs and sub-DLAs
reported.
