The most metal-rich damped Lyman alpha systems at z>1.5 I: The Data
  We present HIRES observations for 30 damped Lyman alpha systems, selected on
the basis of their large metal column densities from previous, lower resolution
data. The measured metal column densities for Fe, Zn, S, Si, Cr, Mn, and Ni are
provided for these 30 systems. Combined with previously observed large metal
column density damped Lyman alpha systems, we present a sample of 44 damped
Lyman alpha systems observed with high resolution spectrographs (R~30000).
These damped Lyman alpha systems probe the most chemically evolved systems at
redshifts greater than 1.5. We discuss the context of our sample with the
general damped Lyman alpha population, demonstrating that we are probing the
top 10% of metal column densities with our sample. In a companion paper, we
will present an analysis of the sample's elemental abundances in the context of
galactic chemical enrichment.
