How documentalists update SIMBAD

The Strasbourg astronomical Data Center (CDS) has been existing for more than 40 years. It develops a service called SIMBAD with over 280.000 bibliographic references for over 7 million astronomical objects (18 million object identifiers). The SIMBAD astronomical database provides basic data, cross-identifications, bibliography and measurements for astronomical objects outside the solar system. SIMBAD brings to the scientific community a value-added content that is updated daily by a team of documentalists in strong interaction with astronomers and IT specialists.

In this poster we will explain how CDS populates SIMBAD with object citations in the main astronomical journals as well as with astronomical data and measurements. We will also explain how the identification between the objects found in the literature and those already existing in SIMBAD is made. Therefore we show the steps followed by the documentalist team to update the database using different tools developed at CDS like the sky visualiser Aladin and the large catalogues and survey database VizieR.

As a direct result of this team work, SIMBAD receives more than 400.000 queries per day and integrates almost 10.000 bibliographic references per year.