Famous Hoosiers ~Biography Resource Center Tutorial
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Search Engines and Web Directories
EXAMPLE search for a specific person
What follows is a sample step-by-step basic search to show you what is available in the Biography Resource Center database. For a more complete description of the database and advice on searching and advanced features, see the Help Guide available in Biography Resource Center.
From the INSPIRE homepage
- Search Databases
- Scroll down to "other search options"
- Select Biography Resource Center
- Type in the name of the person (i.e. James Dean)
- Make sure the "name contains" radio button is selected
Select "Search"
Search Results
This search returns a page that looks like this:
In this case, we are searching for James Dean, the actor who died in 1955, so we select Dean, James (American actor, 1931-1955). The small camera icon indicates that there are portraits available.
The first page we see looks like this:
There is a photo of the subject, as well as his profession, birth and death years and his full name. There are four tabs dividing the information into categories. The first category is narrative biographies, which will provide detailed information on the subject from scholarly sources such as Encyclopedia of World Biography .
Narrative Biographies
The narrative biographies tab is already selected and the results are shown on the same page:
Clicking on the underlined blue text will take you to the full text of the resource cited.
Marking a record by selecting the check box and clicking "update mark list" throughout your search will create a list of the sources selected. Once you have marked a record, two new buttons appear: "view mark list" and "view citation list." By clicking the view citation list, you can view the sources you have marked and e-mail these sources to yourself for later use in your references or works cited page. E-mail yourself the sources by selecting the e-mail icon in the upper left-hand corner that appears on those pages.
For a further explanation of the mark list, check out the Biography Resource Center's help guide.
Thumbnail biographies:
The next tab is thumbnail biographies, which is identical in layout to the narrative biographies. Thumbnail biographies provide short, concise information on the person.
Magazine articles:
The magazine articles tab directs you to full text articles from respected periodicals. There are 58 articles available on James Dean, but only ten appear on the first page. In order to view the other articles, you select the page number from the list:
Websites:
The final tab guides you to websites selected by Gale Group, the creators of Biography Resource Center. These websites are selected based on the presence of a significant amount of biographical information available on the subject as well as links to related topics and frequency of updates. To view links to the websites, click on the underlined blue text "Dean, James (1931-1955)."
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