---
author:
- Tayyaba Zafar
- Attila Popping
- Céline Péroux
bibliography:
- 'dla.bib'
date: 'Received / Accepted '
title: 'The ESO UVES Advanced Data Products Quasar Sample - I. Dataset and New $N_{{H}\,{\sc I}}$ Measurements of Damped Absorbers'
---

Introduction
============

Among the absorption systems observed in the spectra of quasars, those with the highest neutral hydrogen column density are thought to be connected with the gas reservoir responsible for forming galaxies at high redshift and have deserved wide attention (see review by @wolfe05). These systems are usually classified according to their neutral hydrogen column density as damped Ly$\alpha$ systems (hereafter DLAs) with $N_{{\rm H}\,{\sc \rm I}}\ge2\times10^{20}$ atoms cm$^{-2}$ [e.g., @storrie00; @wolfe05] and sub-damped Ly$\alpha$ systems (sub-DLAs) with $10^{19}\le N_{{\rm H}\,{\sc \rm I}}\le2\times10^{20}$ atoms cm$^{-2}$ [e.g., @peroux03b].

The study of these systems has made significant progress in recent years, thanks to the availability of large sets of quasar spectra with the two-degree field survey (2dF, @croom01) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; @prochaska05; @noterdaeme09; @noterdaeme12b). They have been shown to contain most of the neutral gas mass in the Universe [@lanzetta91; @lanzetta95; @wolfe95] and are currently used to measure the redshift evolution of the total amount of neutral 