Everything you ever wanted to know about…

How many movies has Samuel L. Jackson starred in? Aside from the telephone, what else did Alexander Graham Bell invent? How accurate was The Social Network in portraying Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? With the Library’s biographical resources, you can find out just about anything about anyone.

The world's most interesting man says: I don't always look up my own life story, but when I do, I use the online reference collection.

Finding bios of people online can be super easy. Especially with websites like Wikipedia or IMDB, it may be more difficult to not find information about people online. As helpful as the world wide web can be, it’s often not the most credible of places to find information. Using the Library’s online reference collection, you have access to millions of biographies, still right at your fingertips. And you know it’s coming from Library-recommended, credible sources.

(You can use the link above, or if you start at the UGL homepage, click on Find in the upper right corner, and then select Biographies.)

There are a lot of resources to sift through, depending on your interests. These are some of our favorite multi-subject resources:

Biography Resource Center: This database covers people from all over the world, in all subject areas, from all points in history. You can search in a variety of ways, too: by name, occupation, birth or death years, and many others. Bonus: a lot of times, entries will include links to news articles, magazine articles or other references materials about the person in question.

American National Biography: If you need information about a famous American, this is a great place to get started. In addition to having bios of over 17,000 people, it also links you to other resources if you find yourself needing more info.

Credo Reference Biographies: While it may not contain its own full-text bios, it can link you out to other great resources, all by searching in one place.

In addition to the broad-coverage resources, there are also great places to start like American Men and Women of Science, Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and Distinguished Asian Americans, all of which cover more specific subject areas.

If you get stuck trying to find information about a specific person, come talk to us at the Research Desk, stop in during Office Hours @ the UGL, or chat us up on IM. Stay curious, #ClubUGL.

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