Although the HST GSC–I (Paper-I: Lasker et al. 1990, Paper-II: Russell et al. 1990, Paper-III: Jenkner et al. 1990) has been used with great success operationally, it was always known that it was possible to improve the scientific and operational usefulness by an increase in scope to include multi-color and multi-epoch data. Once the GSC-II concept was established, it was evident that, even beyond the original motivations in HST operations, it would address a number of other astronomical needs such as increasing demands for fainter catalogues to support remote or queue scheduling capabilities and adaptive optics on the next generation of large-aperture, new-technology telescopes. In addition, the all sky nature of the GSC–II makes it a natural data source for research in galactic structure.