World Biographical Index (WBI) (Rutgers University Libraries)

Find Articles: Indexes and Databases:
World Biographical Index (WBI)

Rutgers Restricted
Access

Description: WBI is an index to the biographical articles collected from many different sources in the KG Saur microfiche collections known as biographical archives and the World Biographical Information System (WBIS) database that provides online fulltext from these archives. The entries in WBI do not link to WBIS fulltext, but they identify the individuals' full names, country, profession, birth and death dates, and references for the print and microfiche publications where the articles may be found. There are biographical details on more than 5.24 million people from the 8th century BC onward. Various search languages (including English) are available. Basic Search enables you to search for names or parts of names, Biographical Search permits multiple-field searching in many different biographical categories, and Bibliographic Search allows you to search bibliographic entries of reference works that were used to compile the biographical archives. Index links for each search field enable you to select available terms. Records can be downloaded or emailed.

Help: WBI provides online help screens.
Opening screen says World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online but our access is only to the WBI subset.

Dates covered: References are to articles published from 1559 to the late twentieth century.

Sources: Citations refer to articles in the more than 5300 reference works that have been combined in over 40 different biographical archive microfiche sets.

Print counterpart or related resources

Rutgers owns five of the microfiche biographical archive sets to which WBI citations refer:

In addition, we own many of the printed reference books identified in the citations.