The loading process is performed by a single c-shell script using an encoding c-program, applied in sequence to all the regions of the original catalogue. Records are sorted by declination, then scaling factors and offsets are applied to the fields of each record. The bit-encoding process follows, with the definition of an header appropriate to each region.
The directory structure used for storing on disk the encoded regions of the compressed GSC is the same used in the original GSC, plus additional directories for source codes, executables, and auxiliary tables. The total size of the compressed version of the GSC, including these additional directories, is about 303Mb.
The compressed version of the GSC v1.1 was installed on the CDS Archive machine (name cdsarc, Internet number 130.79.128.5) a Sun workstation dedicated to archives of astronomical catalogues (see e.g. B.I.CDS 1992, 41, 65).