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Department Resources | Library Resources | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Library Resources
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Overview
The original Dictionary of National Biography, one of the greatest scholarly achievements of the nineteenth century, provided detailed biographies of all significant figures in the history of Great Britain in over sixty volumes. The new version includes three major updates that make it indispensable to any scholar in British literature and culture: it now covers the twentieth century; coverage of women is much more extensive than in the original version; and all entries are completely rewritten to reflect advances in scholarship. The new ODNB is available on line in fully searchable form. The cost is $1,346 a year.
Definitive Scholarship
It is essential for scholars and even more so for students in this age of random Googling and Wikipedia to have access to the best scholarship: although plenty of free biographies of Shakespeare (for example) are available on the web, the Shakespeare entry in the ODNB is written by a top authority, Peter Holland, who has devoted his career to the subject.
Access
Online access is often a necessary incentive to get students to use the resource and also more typical of the way that scholars use reference works today: from their offices, while researching in archives, or while traveling to conferences. Moreover, the on line ODNB is continually being updated and corrected. Since Ellis Library only has the print version (2004), we do not have access to the updates.
Searchability
The online ODNB would enable us not only to read and search the most current version of Virginia Woolf's biography--or Charles Darwin's or Anne Boleyn's--but also to search for any of these names throughout the database to trace their influences on later figures. Keyword searching for terms ranging from "sonnet" to "censorship" would likewise generate a broader field of results than any specifically literary database or encyclopedia.
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