Let's take your questions one at a time:
1. Setting the album, artist, etc info on your lecture CDs:
If you're looking for FULL track information, title of each track, etc, I'm not sure there's an automatic way to do that in JRiver Media Center. You might be able to use an external program like MusicBrainz Picard, which is able to do a lot of this matching stuff sort of automatically. But this is an unusual case because it's not music, so the meta data is probably not NEARLY as well known as something popular, or even semi-popular.
Now, we *can* pretty easily group them all together as the same album and same artist, assuming your first 2 CDs have that info filled out properly. You need to open the Tagging Pane to do this. Select one of the tracks that is correct. Now *also* select one or more tracks that are incorrect. Open the Tagging Pane by right clicking and selecting Tag.
In the Tagging Pane on the left, you'll see album, artist, etc. Click the down arrow next to Artist and it will pull down to show you the two (or more) Artists listed in the files you have selected. Just click on the one that's correct and it will be set for ALL the files you selected. You can repeat this for Album as well, to set the Album correctly.
Try this on a few files to make sure it works. Once it does, you can do all the rest in one shot! Now, to group them all as the same album, you'll want to set the Disc # field on each disk. Select all of disc 1, open the Tagging Pane, and enter the disc number. Boom, it's set. Do that with Disc 2, 3, etc, and they should all group properly as the same "album". Assuming you want to see them all under the same album name, which is normally what you want.
As for the track names, you'll probably want to do that manually unfortunately.
Next post will address your second question.
Brian.