How to find books or articles written by a prominent figure
To find books and articles that were written by your prominent figure, use Advanced OneSearch. In OneSearch you can:
- Do an Author/Creator search for your figure with the format "last name, first name."
- If you switch to a title search with your authors name, you will find materials that are about you prominent figure. You could do the same thing my searching on subject with your person.
- You could even do something more complex and search for the author as your prominent figure AND a keyword for an important topic they wrote on
- OneSearch automatically filters out newspaper items, so adding them back in the search results could help to find interviews or other articles written about your figure.
- WorldCat This link opens in a new window
Contains an online catalog to the book, media, archival, journal, map, music, and special collections holdings of libraries across the United States and internationally.
How to search on a topic in OneSearch
If you are researching a topic for your biographical assignment, you can search OneSearch in much the same way. This is also a chance for you to utilize boolean operators.
Interviews (Newspaper search)
- Access world news This link opens in a new window
Provides access to news publications from across the world, including major national and international newspapers, as well as local and regional titles.
- Newspaper source plus This link opens in a new window
Provides a full-text digital collection of the world's major news content. It includes millions of articles from newspapers, newswires and news magazines.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Provides access to resources for researching news, business, industry, and legal topics.
National Biographies (Deceased Individuals)
- American national biography online This link opens in a new window
Discover biographies of more than 19,000 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped American history and culture.
- Australian dictionary of biography This link opens in a new window
Presents concise biographical articles on significant and representative persons in Australian history.
- Dictionary of Irish biography This link opens in a new window
Covers Irish men and women from the earliest times until 2001, providing biographies and a sense of their influence on Irish history, culture, and life.
- Oxford dictionary of national biography This link opens in a new windowProvides authoritative biographies of deceased individuals who influenced British history, including colonial British-Americans. Biographies include a listing of major works written by the individual (if any) and a reference list of full-length biographies and critical articles. Each biography also includes a "Reputation" section which describes the individual's standing in his or her time period and how that has changed since then. Very helpfully will indicate where the individual's archives are, if they exist. Also provides links to major themed articles (on the American Founding Fathers, for instance), entries to related individuals, and to other online resources produced by Oxford University Press (which we may or may not have access to). Oxford University Press.
Reference Resources
- Credo This link opens in a new window
Provides access to authoritative content from subject encyclopedias and handbooks covering every major subject.
- Gale Ebooks This link opens in a new windowProvides online access to a significant number of reference works published by Gale. Includes works in all academic subjects, and includes encyclopedias, literary criticism (individual works, authors, and movements/genres), biographical dictionaries, directories, and dictionaries (of events, ideas, and movements). Most entries have the option of being read (includes downloading an MP3 of the computer-voice reading). Gale Cengage.
