What do Lady Gaga, Reba McEntire and St. Theresa de Avila have in common? Find out this and more with Biography in Context (formerly known as Biography Reference Center).
Biography in Context was updated and relaunched in the Fall of 2010 with more multimedia content, a translation feature and Read Speaker Text-to-Speech technology. Use Biography in Context to find award-winning biographies from Gale Group sources and full-text articles from hundreds of periodicals. Search for people based on one or more personal facts such as birth and death year, nationality, ethnicity, occupation or gender.
By the way, the advanced search was used to find the common link for Lady Gaga, Reba McEntire and St. Theresa de Avila - they share the same birthday, March 28th. By searching for "March 28th" as a keyword in the full text, their biographies came up along with other biographies that mentioned this date as part of the birth date, death date or another important date noted in the biography.
More great features of Biography In Context:
· 600,000+ biographies covering more than 525,000 individuals
· Multimedia content such as images, videos and podcasts
· Over 170+ award-winning Gale reference titles
· 50,000 new or updated biographies added annually in addition to daily updates
· Content organized by type (reference, news, magazine, primary sources and more)
Questions to explore with Biography In Context
1. I need a recent picture of Margaret Thatcher. How can I find one of her using Biography In Context?
· In the search option box type in Margaret Thatcher
· Click on her name in blue
· Now click on the camera or the linked titled images and a picture of the former prime Minister’s picture will appear.
2. Margaret Thatcher is our person of focus for Women’s History Month and I need to make sure a team of seven people receive this information. How can I email her biography to the entire group?
· Type in the former Prime Minister’s name
· On the left hand side click on References
· Scroll down to Document types and under this heading select Biography
· Select one of the appropriate biographies
· To the left under the heading of Tools select email
· Lastly complete the necessary entries, sender, from, subject and select format and click the send button.
3. I need a biography of a Bahamian Sculptor born between 1960 and 1970. What is the name of that sculptor?
- Under “People Search” at the top (under the search box) click on People Search. This will allow you to narrow your search by occupation, nationality and year range of birth. The answer is Antoni, Janine.
