The Norris survey of the Corona Borealis Supercluster .1. Observations and catalog construction

`We have conducted a redshift survey of a 6 degrees x 6 degrees region in the core of the Corona Borealis Supercluster using the 176 fiber Norris Spectrograph on the Hale 5 m telescope. The input catalog from which we selected objects is based on machine scans of Schmidt plates and consists of over 5 x 10(5) objects. As it was impractical for us to obtain spectroscopy of such an enormous number of objects, we chose to observe 36 20' diameter fields arranged in a 6 x 6 grid across the core of the supercluster. We have completed observations of 23 of these fields, as well as an additional nine fields that were closely spaced along the ridge of galaxies between Abell 2061 and Abell 2067. We have measured redshifts for 1491 extragalactic objects, 420 with similar to 8 Angstrom resolution and the remainder with similar to 4 Angstrom resolution. Our newly measured redshifts were augmented with 163 redshifts from the literature, yielding 1654 redshifts for the entire survey. The faintest galaxies in the survey have magnitudes of g similar to 23 mag, and the most distant galaxies have redshifts of z similar to 0.7. This survey will be used to explore the dynamics of the Corona Borealis Supercluster and, since 1060 of the galaxies are more distant than the Corona Borealis Supercluster, to study large-scale structure and galaxy evolution to z similar to 0.5. In this paper, we describe the selection of targets, the multifiber spectroscopy, and the data reduction. We also present the redshift catalog and an analysis of possible selection biases in apparent magnitude, surface brightness, color, and angular separation of pairs on the sky.