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Biography Reference Center

Tutorial

Welcome to EBSCO’s Biography Reference Center (BRC) tutorial. BRC offers a comprehensive collection of more than 450,000 full text biographies, including the complete full text run of Biography Today and Biography Magazine. In this tutorial, we will look at conducting a search from the Basic and Advanced

screens, as well as the browsing options available in BRC.

We’ll begin by conducting a search in Biography Reference Center from the Basic Search screen. Enter your terms in the Find field and click Search.

A result list will be displayed, defaulted to the “Names” Source Type if a name matches your search term. You can choose to filter your results using the Narrow Results by column on the left. Click on a Source Type to view All Results, Detailed or Concise Biographies, Interviews, Obituaries, or Related

Articles. Click on the name in the Result List to view the Biography Landing Page.

From the Biography Landing Page, you can read available Detailed or Concise Biographies as well as articles related to your subject. You can also Print, E-mail, Save, or Export the Biography Landing Page information, as well as add it to the folder. To save it beyond the current session, sign up for a

personal folder by clicking the Sign In link on the top toolbar.

Basic Search also features three biography browsing options. You can Browse All Biographies, browse Biographies by Genre, or browse biographies using the Image Carousel feature. To use the

Image Carousel, drag the slider left or right and click on the image of the person you would like to read more about.

Once you’ve clicked on an image, you will be brought to the Biography Landing Page of your subject. Next, we will look at conducting a search from the Advanced Search screen, found by clicking the

Advanced Search link below the Find field.

On the Advanced Search screen, you can apply limiters and expanders to focus your search. In this example, we will enter astronauts in the Find field and select Female from the Gender limiter to select

from available biographies of female astronauts, then click Search.

A list of female astronauts in BRC is displayed in the result list. In this example, we have the option to filter your results by Nationality as well as by Occupation under the Narrow Results by column. Click

on a name in the result list to view the Biography Landing Page.

Returning to the Advanced Search screen, there are several Biography Reference Center browsing options available. You can browse All Biographies, Occupations, Nationalities, Publications, or the Dictionary, as well

as browse biographies by Genre. For this demonstration, we will browse by clicking the Occupations link.

The “Indexes” browse screen is displayed with Occupation selected from the Browse an Index drop-down menu. If you would like to view all Occupations, leave the Browse for field empty and click the

Browse button. For this demonstration, we will enter Golfer in the Browse for field and click Browse.

The alphabetical list of occupations is displayed. If there is an exact match for your term, it will appear at the top of the list. To search biographies by an occupation, place a check in the box for the occupation

you would like to search, and click Add. The occupation will be placed in the Find field. If you would like, add additional terms in the Find field and click Search.

A result list of names matching your occupation search is displayed. Click on a name to view the Biography Landing page.

Click on the Help link to view the complete online help manual, and visit the EBSCO Support Site at http://support.ebsco.com to browse our Knowledge Base of FAQs, download Help Sheets, User Guides

and tutorials, or see what’s new in our Top Stories.

This concludes the Biography Reference Center tutorial.