O-C Gateway: The literature reference

In the begin the data collection contained only minima published by some few amateur societies. The system of the literature reference was very simple, one character designing the society (SOC, first character of the PUBLICATION field) and the number of the bulletin (remaining characters of the PUBLICATION field) published by that society.
Later some journals have been scanned for data, for example IBVS, and the system worked well.

Small troubles arised with BBSAG, that published some lists of minima in the Orion journal before the BBSAG journal was established. A separate numbering of the older lists, "..12" brought the data into the correct order.

Larger troubles arised with Peremennye zvezdy due to the history of that journal. The 4-digit bulletin number is insufficient to contain the necessary information.

Many other publications contain minima and maxima timings of variable stars and our system of literature reference is insufficient to backtrack them. The field NOTE, originaly used for other purpose, was adopted for the literature reference.

In some cases the field INSTRUMENT contains relevant information, specialy with the values "Rotse" and "Asas".

Data from the Hipparcos satelite have "Hipparcos" as the observer name.

The collection by now contains more then 200 000 rows of data and it would be manual work to edit the literature reference into one, unique form.

But we hope that the users of the database will be able to find the original paper at least in 99 percent of the cases.

The SOC may have the following values:

'A' = AAVSO
'B' = BBSAG
'C' = BRNO
'D' = BAV
'E' = Open European Journal on Variable stars (OEJV)
'F' = AFOEV
'G' = GEOS
'H' = AKV (Hartha)
'I' = IBVS
'J' = VSOLJ
'K' = Krakow
'L' = not used
'M' = MVS
'N' = Astronom. Nachrichten
'O' = Astronom. Cirkular
'P' = Peremennye Zvezdy
'R' = BAAVSS
'S' = not used
'T' = not used
'U' = not used
'V' = VSS Sonneberg
'W' = VSOLJ by email
'X' = not used
'Y' = not used
'Z' = not used
'0' = none of the listed
' ' = not specified