Archives of Photometric Data

The process of archiving photometric data and compiling catalogues is in principle easy to solve, but, in practice, does not appear so simple. Data retrieval may become difficult and inefficient if sufficient care is not taken to solve the general problems which are encoutered: (i) the lack of definition of fundamental identificators; (ii) the lack of coordinates for thousands of faint stars; (iii) the innacuracy of the identification and description of the components observed in double stars or multiple systems: A, B, C, AB, or BC; (iv) the fact that the number of observations is often not published.