Bibliography and references

The access to general or bibliographic information is considered as a very important facility that the database should offer. The catalogues already available in computer-readable form have been installed in the database and an additional bibliographic service covering the recent literature has been developed in another style to make the retrieval easier and more efficient. The various facets are provided by:

• the compilation of cluster parameters by Lyngå (1987), which provides the global information available on open clusters;
• the bibliography compiled by Alter et al. (1970) and its first supplement (Ruprecht et al. 1981), which collect the references from about 1900 or before up to 1973.
• the recent bibliography, covering the years 1969 to the present day, which has been developed for the database. This bibliography is based on chapter 153 of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts and the recent references are regularly entered in the computer. The bibliography search is based on keywords. The most obvious one is simply the cluster name, but many others can be used. Abstracts are not yet included in the database.
• the information on ongoing work, generally extracted from observatory reports and AAS abstracts is also available from the database.

The source of most data are indicated and the references can be obtained either one by one for any type of data or for any sample.