Fundamental questions still outstanding with regard
to Be stars are the radial dependence of the density, temperature
and velocity structure of the circumstellar disk surrounding the star. In
addition the dependence of these parameters on the
effective temperature (spectral type),
evolutionary status (luminosity class), and rotational velocity
of the underlying B star is unknown.
In an attempt to answer these questions we have devised a multiwavelength
approach which combines optical and infrared spectroscopy of a carefully
selected sample of Be stars containing both giants and dwarfs of
spectral types from O9 to B8.5. Our dataset comprises observations of
58 Be stars in 5 wavelength regions and is summarised in Table 1.
This paper presents the details of the sample selection and an analysis of the classification (absorption line) features in the 3670 - 5070 Å spectra. We defer discussion of the emission line features in these spectra to subsequent papers, where we will consider them in conjunction with the emission line spectra at other wavelengths.
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