SIMBAD references

This is the first of a series of papers presenting VLBI observations of the 293 Caltech-Jodrell Bank Flat-Spectrum (hereafter CJF) sources and their analysis. One of the major goals of the CJF is to make a statistical study of the apparent velocities of the sources. We have conducted global VLBI and VLBA observations at 5GHz since 1990, accumulating thirteen separate observing campaigns. We present here an overview of the observations, give details of the data reduction and present the source parameters resulting from a model-fitting procedure. For every source at every observing epoch, an image is shown, built up by restoring the model-fitted components, convolved with the clean beam, into the residual image, which was made by Fourier transforming the visibility data after first subtracting the model-fitted components in the uv-plane. Overplotted we show symbols to represent the model components. We have produced VLBI images of all but 5 of the 293 sources in the complete CJF sample at several epochs and investigated the kinematics of 266 AGN.