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.
