The UCSD/Keck damped Lyα abundance database:: A decade of high-resolution spectroscopy

We publish the Keck/HIRES and Keck/ESI spectra that we have obtained during the first 10 years of Keck observatory operations. Our full sample includes 42 HIRES spectra and 39 ESI spectra along 65 unique sight lines providing abundance measurements on approximate to 85 DLA systems. The normalized data can be downloaded from the journal or from our supporting Web site. The database includes all of the sight lines that have been included in our papers on the chemical abundances, kinematics, and metallicities of the damped Ly alpha systems. This data has also been used to argue for variations in the fine-structure constant. We present new chemical abundance measurements for 10 damped Ly alpha systems and a summary table of high-resolution metallicity measurements ( including values from the literature) for 153 damped Ly alpha systems at z > 1.6. We caution, however, that this metallicity sample (and all previous ones) is biased to higher N-H I values than a random sample.