The continuation of the Abt-Biggs catalog of stellar radial velocities from 1970 is presented. A first part (6000 references) has been published on microfiches (CDS, 1980). Five thousand new references should be published in a near future.

The principles of the work on the new catalogue of the optical HII-regions are described.

On the basis of thirteen catalogues and lists of the optical HII-regions the catalogue of these objects had been compiled by me (Marsalkova, 1974). The main source of the objects on the northern sky was the catalogue of Sharpless (1959) which up to now is the only one in computer-readable form, the southern sky being characterized by a larger number of smaller catalogues represented in first place by that of Rodgers et al (1960) and that of Gum (1955). For this already published catalogue (now referred to as the “old” one) only optical data were taken into account. The catalogue was supplemented by a list of excluded HII-regions like supernova remnants, planetary nebulae and galaxies.

Since the catalogue by Perek and Kohoutek (PK) has been printed in 1967, numerous observations and theoretical studies have been made, and new planetary nebulae (NP) have been discovered, in addition to the 1036 PN indexed by PK. We have compiled a bibliographic index from 1965, covering about 80 papers per year; a catalogue of 1455 PN and a bibliographic index have been established (Acker, Marcout, Ochsenbein, 1981).

Now, two important catalogues are being compiled which result from the joint work of the Observatories of Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Marseille, the Laboratory of Astronomy of Montpellier, and the Observatory of Haute Provence.

Owing to the ever-increasing number of publications it has become more and more difficult for scientists to find physics data relevant to their respective activities in the primary scientific and technical literature. With the exception of their special field of research they have to rely on data compilations. In many fields of physics, however, such data compilations do not exist or do not fulfill the requirements of the users, either because they are out of date or because they are published in places that are not well known. This unsatisfactory situation has been confirmed by an inquiry performed by the German Physical Society in 1972.