Hi, I came across this page because I have the same question about page 2 of collection pages. In my case, the URL for page 2 of a collection would be site.com/collection?p=2, with the canonical tag for the page also pointing to site.com/collection?p=2.
I am concerned that this will create duplicate content, because the collection description is repeated on each page of the collection.
Is your advice still current? The link in your response no longer exists, and according to webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html, Rel=prev/next is not an indexing signal anymore.
Thanks!