Spectrophotometry of nearby field galaxies: The data

We have obtained integrated and nuclear spectra as well as U, B, R surface photometry for a representative sample of 196 nearby galaxies. These galaxies span the entire Hubble sequence in morphological type, as well as a wide range of luminosities (M(B) = -14 to -22). Here we present the spectrophotometry for these galaxies. The selection of the sample and the U, B, R surface photometry is described in a companion paper. Our goals for the project include measuring the current star formation rates and metallicities of these galaxies, and elucidating their star formation histories, as a function of luminosity and morphology. We thereby extend the work of Kennicutt to lower luminosity systems. We anticipate that our study will be useful as a benchmark for studies of galaxies at high redshift. We describe the observing, data reduction, and calibration techniques and demonstrate that our spectrophotometry agrees well with that of Kennicutt. The spectra span the range 3550-7250 Angstrom, at a resolution (FWHM) of similar to 6 Angstrom and have an overall relative spectrophotometric accuracy of similar to +/- 6%. We present a spectrophotometric atlas of integrated and nuclear rest-frame spectra as well as tables of equivalent widths and synthetic colors. The atlas and tables of measurements will be made available electronically. We study the correlations of galaxy properties determined from the spectra and images. Our findings include: (1) galaxies of a given morphological class display a wide range of continuum shapes and emission-line strengths if a broad range of luminosities are considered, (2) emission-line strengths tend to increase and continua tend to get bluer as the luminosity decreases, and (3) the scatter on the general correlation between nuclear and integrated H alpha emission-line strengths is large.