- A good starting point is the Biography Resource Center & The Complete Marquis Who’s Who. These two databases can be searched together in order to find biographies, articles, portraits, and other sources on more than one million people from throughout history and around the world including authors, actors, musicians, political leaders, religious leaders, artists, historic figures and more. In many cases, this will provide the information needed without any further research.
- For information about people who are connected with the history of the British Isles, use the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- For book-length biographies check the online catalog. Try a subject search for: Last Name, First Name.
- For Members of the US Congress information, use Lexis-Nexis Congressional. Choose the Members link to find:
- committee assignments
- bills sponsored
- voting records
- floor statements
- campaign finance records
- financial disclosures
- other biographical information for members of Congress back to 1997
- For musicians, try Grove Music Online.
- For more on authors, try the Literature Resource Center. For children’s authors try Something About the Author.
- For more on artists, try the Art Full Text database.
- For a list of additional biography resources on the Web, view the Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII) People page. More specific lists are available from the LII California People page.
- Search the Biography & Genealogy Master Index for more than 13.3 million biographical sketches from an extremely broad selection of biographical reference sources. Use this index to locate information on lesser-known people who cannot be found in the full text databases. Although it does not index every major biographical source in our collection it comes very close. Use it as a gateway to our print resources.
- Specialized sources on local people are available in the following Library departments:
- Finally, if none of these sources contain the biographical information you are looking for, or if you get stuck at any point, ask a reference librarian for further assistance.
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