Introduction

Catalogs of the Local Volume (LV) (i.e. of galaxies within 10 Mpc) obviously are highly incomplete for at least two reasons; firstly, the 'zone of avoidance' with its extinction of several magnitudes in the optical light hides many galaxies and secondly, studies of the LV always need an all-sky coverage which will be nearly always sensitivity limited. There are different ways to improve the degree of completeness of the nearby galaxy sample, e.g. a deep all sky optical survey like the Second Palomar Sky Survey (POSSII) or an all sky 'blind' survey in the 21-cm line of neutral atomic hydrogen like HIPASS (HI Parkes Sky Survey).

Karachentseva and Karachentsev (1998) published the first part of their search for candidates of nearby dwarf galaxies, a result of searching POSSII and ESO/SERC films by eye and magnifying glass for faint objects with a diameter limit of 0.5'. They found 245 galaxies within a region defined by the nearby galaxy groups within the Local Volume. The area covered in this search corresponds to about 25% of the sky. 139 of the galaxies in their list were not cataloged before. Most of the listed galaxies are low surface brightness objects. Here we are reporting on results which are based only on the first part of the Karachentsev catalog. Work on the second part is in progress.