Biographical Sources
Posted by: Jessica Moyer
Being inundated with information about the life of Edward Kennedy over the last two days got me thinking about biographical sources. What role does print still play in biographical information? Is there even a place for it?
Every time I teach reference I include a couple of biographical questions; one about a living person, one a dead historical person. I require my students to look at print sources, but I wonder if it is worth their time. They rarely find current information (if any) on living people, but do find plenty of information on the historical people. My library experience tells me that patrons are much more likely to need help or want to search for information on living or recently deceased people (like Kennedy). And there are usually plenty of circulating biographies for patrons interested in historical people. With the exception of two books on mathematicians (for a regular assignment) in all the years I’ve done reference collection development, I’ve never purchased a purely biographical source in print.
Is there still a place in the reference collection for biographical sources? Or are they just taking up space? This also brings up a related topic – how important is it for new librarians to learn about “classic” reference sources like Dictionary of National Biography?
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
In my experience, students (grade school through high school) still need to do research on historical figures and are frequently required to do at least some of their research in print sources.