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Biographical Resources

Biographies!

The Ithaca College Library can provide a copious amount of biographical information. There are thousands of full length biographies in the general stacks. For briefer biographical information, there are dozens of biographical resources in the Reference Collection and online.

What is a biography?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines biography as "The process of recording the events and circumstances of another person's life, esp. for publication (latterly in any of various written, recorded, or visual media); the documenting of individual life histories (and, later, other forms of thematic historical narrative), considered as a genre of writing or social history." See this link.

Biography then is about a person as a subject of a work, rather than about that person's works or subject area.

What about autobiography?

Autobiographies are works that people write about themselves. These are often edited by others, but the primary work was written by the person. Some terms to search for when looking for autobiographies are diaries, memoirs, personal narratives. Autobiographies may also contain letters or correspondence from the person.

Sample Online Biographical Dictionaries

More Online Biographical Dictionaries

Abby Juda

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Abby Juda
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