New: Diccionario Biográfico Electrónico (DBE)

I am pleased to report that Oxford researchers now have access to the Diccionario Biográfico Electrónico (DBE).

The DBE is an updated and corrected version of the Spanish national biography, Diccionario biográfico español, providing online access to more than 45,000 biographies of deceased individuals which span 2,500 years of Spanish history. While its focus is on the Iberian Peninsula, it has a global reach to include biographies of individuals active in territories which were part of the Spanish administration. Each biography has a brief listing of key readings.

Important: please note that only the basic search is available without login. For advanced search, log in using the username and password on WebLearn (see instructions in Databases A-Z). Please log out when you have finished as only one Oxford user can be logged in at a time.

Advanced search is particularly useful to locate biographies of individuals whose names you don’t know. For instance you can search by religion, profession, locality, etc. Once you have found a biographical entry, DBE then suggests other individuals related in some way to your person of interest.

While you are here…

  • List of other online biographical resources (only some will be freely accessible)
  • New books on historical biography (blogpost January 2019)
  • Tip how to find published biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, etc. in SOLO:
    • In SOLO, go to Advanced Search
    • Change Any Field to Subject
    • Add biography to the Subject field
    • Can you refine your search further by adding for instance a country to the search, limiting it by language or publication year.