CHAPTER 21:

BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE SOURCES

This chapter discusses several important sources of biographical information.

Biographical information is information about the life of a particular person. If the person is famous, biographical information is easy to find. The Library’s book collection, for example, contains many book-length biographies of people who are more or less famous. Many of the subjects of these biographies also have written autobiographies (i.e., the story of a famous person's life written by that person him/herself). 

Famous or important people are often included in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Subject encyclopedias are especially good sources of information about people who are particularly important in the encyclopedia’s subject area.  For example, Sigmund Freud will be the subject of an article in both general and subject encyclopedias, but the article in the subject encyclopedia will be much more comprehensive and detailed. 

Women, even important women, tend to be an exception to this rule. Until fairly recently they have not been included as often as they should have been in biographical sources. This imbalance is now being corrected, but it will be many years before the historical importance of women has been fully recognized.

If the person in whom you are interested is not famous, the task of finding information about them is harder. Still, there are many places to look. If the person belongs to a professional group, a biographical directory may have some information. For example the AMERICAN MEN AND WOMEN OF SCIENCE (ref Q141.A47) and the BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY OF THE AMERICAN CONGRESS (ref JK1010.U5). The information regarding Senators and Representatives and other information regarding Congress is available at http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch/biosearch.asp .

National directories are another source of information about people who are not necessarily  famous, but are prominent, for example,  WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA. (ref E663.W56). Similar listings exist for various regions in the U.S., such as WHO'S WHO IN THE WEST, and in various countries, such as, WHO'S WHO IN AFRICA.

For people in the news, a good source of biographical information is a periodical entitled: CURRENT BIOGRAPHY (ref CT100.C8). Published monthly and cumulated annually, this source profiles people from all over the world. A special index lists all of the biographies published from 1940 to 1990.

Retrospective biographical dictionaries contain information regarding dead people whose importance is well-established. Because these dictionaries provide fairly lengthy biographical profiles, they include fewer people than the various WHO'S WHO publications.

One of the most important of these retrospective biographical dictionaries is the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (ref E176.D56). Commonly referred to as the DAB., this multi-volume set was for many years the authoritative  biographical encyclopedia for historically significant Americans. 
 
Another major new American historical biographical encyclopedia is entitled AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY (ref CT213 .A68 1999; 24 vols.)  First published in 1999, the 18,000 biographies in the ANB are written by experts and often include bibliographies. The articles are written in a livelier style than those in the DAB, and they include biographies of many more women and minority members. For these reasons, it now ranks as the most important American encyclopedia of historical biographies.

The NATIONAL CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (ref E176.N28) is not as scholarly or carefully researched as either the DAB or the ANB.  It is important because its eighty-plus volumes make it the most comprehensive collection of historical American biographies. There is a one-volume comprehensive index.
 
The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY (ref CT103 .E567 1998, 2d. ed.) is a good source for historically significant persons worldwide. The recently published second edition contains 7,000 biographies and every effort was made to include as many women and non-Anglo-Europeans as possible. 
 
BIOGRAPHY AND GENEALOGY MASTER INDEX is an especially comprehensive index to standard sources of biographical information. Published annually, the volumes in this set index over six million biographies contained in more than six hundred biographical dictionaries. Another useful index is the BIOGRAPHY INDEX. Published quarterly and cumulated annually, it lists biographical profiles contained in over one thousand magazines and eight hundred dictionaries and directories. Both of these indexes also exist on the Internet. To access them, first, go to the Library website; then use the alphabetical list of the Article Indexes and Online Databases path.

Click on link to go to the Assignments page and print Assignment TWENTY-ONE

http://library.boisestate.edu/skills/locate/assignments.htm