PacSem III: Biography Resources

Unlike public libraries, Pacific’s library does not have a “Biography” section. Since the Library typically organizes books by subject, biographies are located throughout the collection. For example, biographies of writers will be in the literature area, while biographies of chemists will be in the science section. It is best to search the catalog to find biographies on a particular person.

Use PacifiCat, the library's online catalog. You can easily limit your search to biographies as follows:

1. Visit the Advanced Search page.
2. In the Limit Search area of the page, locate the "Base" dropdown menu.
3. Select "Biographies".
4. Type your person's name as usual in the fields at the top of the page.

Remember: Our library does not have many biographies featuring contemporary popular celebrities. If you want to read a biography on Princess Diana or Kurt Cobain you may want to search the Stockton Public Library catalog.

Choose a life that intrigues you. It may help to browse through these sources in the reference area to identify a person in history. Then, check to see if our library owns a biography of that person:

Also visit: “Time Magazine’s The 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century”. Browsing this list may inspire interest in an individual, and then you can search Pacificat for his/her biography.

The Biography Reference Bank is a searchable database of approximately half a million people from antiquity to the present. It will indicate whether a full-length biography on an individual has been published. If we don’t own the biography, it can be obtained through ILLiad, the Library's inter-library loan system.