Langmuir and Langmuir-Blodgett films have been the focus of ever-increasing investigation during the past two decades. This extensive quantity of work has produced a large number of papers concerning a wide spectrum of compounds ranging from "classical" lipids to newly synthesized "exotic" molecules. Unfortunately, until now this material has been dispersed in the literature over a large number of different journals. We describe here a database which has been used to compile information, including surface pressure-area data, for many types of molecules studied during this past decade. Built from an initial sampling of 6000 papers published between 1978 and 1990 in 374 journals and written by 1580 authors, this database contains information on more than 1300 separate compounds. The design, the compilation of the data and potential uses of this database are described.