General Biographical Tools and Digital Libraries

Introduction

WorldCat  --  General Biographical Dictionaries and Indexes --  General Digital Libraries  --  Finding More

Several general resources are important for finding medical biographical information:

  • WorldCat provides bibliographical information and holding libraries for millions of books.  Numerous biographical works too specialized to be included in this guide can be found there.  Instructions for searching various types of medical biographical works are given in appropriate sections of this guide.
  • Much biographical information on physicians and nurses may be found in general biographical dictionaries and indexes.  Several of the biographical works described on the other (medical) pages of this guide are included in general biographical works.
  • Libraries and archives are digitizing vast quantities of their holdings.  Google Books, HathiTrust and Internet Archive are the large, well-known examples, but there are numerous local and/or specialized libraries. Much of this material can be found in digital libraries and often discovered via the Digital Public Library of America.

WorldCat

WorldCat includes catalog records from over 70,000 libraries worldwide but largely U.S. Includes books, periodicals, archives and manuscripts, maps, videotapes, computer readable files, etc.

  • Titles of works in this guide usually link to a WorldCat record.
  • WorldCat is freely available online but your institution may subscribe to a version (WorldCat Discovery or FirstSearch) with a more robust interface
  • WorldCat records offer bibliographical details and a list of holding libraries
  • Every edition and reprint of a work has its own WorldCat record.
  • Consult the Interlibrary Loan department at your institutional or public library for works not held by your local library. Give them the Accession no. at the bottom of the record (i.e., OCLC number) to speed up the request.
  • If you plan to visit a library to view a work, verify with them that they actually still have it and admittance policy

General Biographical Dictionaries and Indexes

The following are large online databases which contain many of the major biographical sources. Many of these require an institutional subscription. To look for and access a subscription at your institution, check your library's catalog or contact the library.

American National Biography (Institutional login) is the preeminent source for well-known, deceased Americans.

  • It's available online and in print (24 vols. + 2 supplements (2002, 2005 only)
  • The standard American source for biographies of deceased major figures.
  • Searchable full text and by occupation and by date. Exists in print (indexed in BGMI) and a continually updated online version.  
  • Bibliographic information with each article.

Biography and Genealogy Master Index. (Institutional login)  Online index to nearly 1700 publications, largely biographical dictionaries and subject encyclopedias.  Birth/death dates given.

  • How can this index be accessed?  Available in institutional subscriptions to BGMI itself,  and in subscriptions to Ancestry.com
  • Indexes of Biography Index (periodical articles);  Who’s Who in America (1973-  ); Who was Who in America; and American Men and Women of Science (1973- ).
  • Full text search: no. Consult materials referenced in their own paper or online versions (for instance, find Biography Index in the next resource on this list).

Biography Reference Bank. (Institutional login) Combines full text from a variety of biographical sources.

  • Includes contents of Biography Index and several other periodical article indexes.
  • Full text search: yes. Can search by name, full text keyword, source, birth date, occupation, gender, place of origin, and ethnicity.

Gale in Context: Biography (Institutional login)  Contains reference books and biographical articles from more than 250 periodicals.

  • Includes  Contemporary Authors; Contemporary Black Biography; Directory of American Scholars (10th (2002) ed.); Dictionary of American Biography (vols. 1-10, supplements 1-10); and Marquis Who’s Who on the Web, which includes Marquis Who’s Who publications since 1985. Who Was Who in America (ed. 17, 2005/06 only) is sometimes included depending on the subscription.
  • The Biographical Facts Search allows search by occupation, nationality, ethnicity (African-American, Asian American, Hispanic- American, Native- American only), gender,  birth/death year, and place.
  • Full text search: yes

Marquis Who's Who Online (also "Who's Who on the Web") (Institutional login). 

  • Provides full text access to biographies appearing in Marquis Who's Who print titles (general and in specific fields) since 1985, plus historical biographies from Who Was Who in America volumes 1607–1985
  • Older Marquis Who's Who titles available through other sources like Gale In Context: Biography, above.

Subject guide to women of the world (print only), by Katharine Joan Phenix. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996, xiv, 516 p.

Provides topical (Nurses, Physicians and Surgeons) index to:

Index to women of the world from ancient to modern times; biographies and portraits (print only), by Norma Olin Ireland. Westwood, Mass., F. W. Faxon Co., 1970. 

Companion to the compiler's Index to scientists of the world. Provides references to biographical sketches of about 13,000 women which appear in 945 collective biographies and a few series, such as Current biography. Indicates location of portraits. Index to women of the world from ancient to modern times:a supplement analyzes some 380 collective biographies published from 1971 to about 1985.

Women in particular: an index to American women (print only), by Kali Herman. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1984.

Index to biographical articles on women in some 54 works of collective biography.  Section on Medicine and Life Sciences (pp. 291-321) Comprises five indexes: (1) Field and career index; (2) Religious affiliation index; (3) Ethnic and racial index; (4) Geographical index; and (5) Alphabetical index. Biographees are entered in as many of the first four sections (and subsections) as are applicable, with full information (name, dates, occupation or field of activity, places of residence, religion, ethnicity, and references to biographical sources) repeated at each entry. The alphabetical (biographee) index lists entries in the other four indexes.

World Biographical Information System Online (WBIS) (Institutional login) includes the full text of entries from over 8,600 biographical dictionaries, in over 40 languages, and contains biographies of over 5 million persons.  Works included date from the 17th century to late 20th century.  

  • Entries can be searched by Name, Gender, Period, Birth Year, Death Year, Year Cited, Occupation, Source, Country. Indexes give full references to the print sources.
  • Full text: depends. Some libraries subscribe to the full text version; others subscribe to it as an index and rely on the online World Biographical Index and/or the full text of the World Biographical System Archive on microfiche for the full text. 
  • Physicians included in WBIS are also indexed in Internationaler biographischer Index der Medizin : Arzte, Naturheilkundler, Veterinarmediziner und Apotheker (print only), by Dietrich von Engelhardt. München : K.G. Saur, 1996, v. 1: A-H. -- 2: I-T. -- 3: U-Z.
    • This book is useful for browsing names.  If you have a Dr. J. Smith, you can browse entries which include birth/death dates and nationalities to help you identify the right name to search in WBIS.

General Digital Libraries

General digital libraries like Google Books, HathiTrust and Internet Archive offer public domain (largely pre-1924 and US government documents) materials in full text. Google Books and HathiTrust can search (but not display) the full text of copyright-protected materials. 

  • These three databases overlap, but each contains unique material. Substantial differences in search functions and download formats
  • Find a scan that's hard to read? You might search another digital library to see if the file is any different. Often when they overlap, these databases contain the same original scans, but another download option might be easier to read.
  • You can choose to search full text within an individual item or to search within millions of items across the database. These "global searches" tend to be useful only for unusual names searched as phrases.
    • Example in HathiTrust Advanced Search:

      this exact phrase: Cushing, Harvey in Full Text + All Fields
      AND
      any of these words: Directories Directory in Subject

Google Book Search offers full text of:

  • Largely, pre-1924 books and periodicals scanned from libraries. Full text searchable and viewable.
  • Post-1924 books and periodicals digitized in libraries. Full text searchable and snippet views displayed
  • "Previews" of books submitted by publishers. Some pages are hidden.  Some, but not all, of the hidden pages are searchable.

HathiTrust (the second "h" is silent) has books and periodicals contributed by major US university libraries.

  • Full text of text of public domain works is available for viewing, including pre-1924 (and some post-1924) works and government documents.
  • Access through a member institution is required to download more than a page at a time (log in from the institution's library website.
  • Copyrighted works can be searched for page numbers (can't see content)

Internet Archive is one of the grandaddies of full text reading resources on the web.

The Online Books Page searches across multiple databases for freely available online books.  Separate book search and serials list.

  • The format may look dated, but the content is there and the curator is transparent about what's included.

Other digital libraries: these three are the largest US-based collections, but they're not the only ones out there. Sometimes a book you're looking for will show up in full if you simply search the web for it. 

  • Note: Individual postings are not always in keeping with copyright law, so know that any copyrighted material posted on non-subscription, non-publisher sites could be there forever or could disappear from one day to the next.

Digital Public Library of America offers textual, visual, and sound resources contributed by numerous libraries, archives, and museums.  Searches catalog records, not full text.  Contains many individual items, such as letters and photographs, from digital collections.

Digital Libraries by State. These websites list hundreds of local, state, and regional resources. Each is different and some are better designed than others.  Very useful when your topic has a regional focus.