Biographies / People search
Here you can learn about how to seek information about people in encyclopedias, web sites and search engines.
A biography is a description of a person’s life, written by somebody else. If the person in question writes about his own life it is called an autobiography. In general dictionaries and encyclopedias such as Nationalencyclopedin and Encyclopedia Britannica, you can find biographies of varying length.
Subject specific dictionaries can also be useful. If you are searching for an author’s biography you can use literature dictionaries such as The Oxford companion to American literature. The encyclopedia Access Science (McGraw-Hill) is a very good source for biographies in science and technology. The Library has both printed and electronic dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Projekt Runeberg contains several older dictionaries and encyclopedias, e.g. ’Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon’ published in 1906 as well as both the first and second edition of the encyclopedia ‘Nordisk familjebok’.
In scientists homepages you can often find interesting material, e.g. descriptions of research projects, lists of publications and conference papers. Sometimes the whole text is published, and other times just the references. There is also often contact information if you want to send an e-mail or make a phone call to ask questions.
In the search engine Scirus’ advanced search form you can choose to search only among scientists home pages. You can also try searching for the scientist’s name or university in the search engine Google.
Jenny Löfkvist
2005-06-22
