News Article 

IPSWICH, Mass. — July 10, 2009 — Students and researchers looking for the highest quality collection of biographies will now have it with the release of Biography Reference Center™ from EBSCO Publishing. The database offers more than 450,000 full-text biographies, but the quality of the sources is the more remarkable aspect of the product.

Biography Reference Collection contains the best possible biographical reference collections & magazines (e.g. – the complete run of Biography Today, more than 9,000 biographies from American National Biography, all of the people entries from Encyclopedia Britannica, etc.), providing superior coverage for one of the most popular and heavily researched genres.

Although only one of the many sources of biographies in the databases, ARBAOnline (American Reference Books Annual) says of Biography Today, “Readers come away from the articles feeling like they have shared a comfortable conversation with the celebrity profiled.”  As part of the agreement, all of the Biography Today biographies have been updated as of 2009 and will continue to be updated on an annual basis.

Biography Reference Center presents users with a new interface and search functionality. Biography-specific indexing for each person profiled in the database provides users with detailed information such as date of birth, city of birth, alias, gender, cultural identity, nationality,  occupation and more. The interface also features a new slide rule browse feature presenting 16 carefully selected people, updated on a regular basis.

The content in Biography Reference Center is accessible by traditional keyword searching and by browsing more than 20 categories, such as:

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search^™, Business Source^®, CINAHL^®, DynaMed^™, Literary Reference Center^™, MasterFILE^™, NoveList^®, SocINDEX^™ and SPORTDiscus^™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database^™, EconLit, INSPEC^®, MEDLINE^®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index^™, PsycARTICLES^® and PsycINFO^®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost^®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.