This is the first of a series of papers aiming at investigating the stellar populations, the radial distribution and the dynamics of early-type galaxies as a function of the environmental density. Spanning about 4 decades in density, the Coma cluster is the ideal place to perform such a study.
We describe ground-based photometry performed to select the outer sample in Sect. 2. The whole spectroscopic sample and its selection properties are discussed in Sect. 3. The spectroscopic observations and data reduction are described in Sect. 4. The spectroscopic database is presented in Sect. 5 and the comparisons with the literature are discussed in Sect. 6. Conclusions are drawn in Sect. 7.
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