Biography

If you are researching someone who is current scholar/academic, you may run into some special challenges. Even if the person has already done influential work, he or she may not appear in any biographical sources. Here are a few options you can try:

• Search for the person's professional homepage/website. Many academic faculty members and other professionals maintain these. Most will have a little bit of biographical information. They will also have contact information. Don't hesitate to contact your psychologist -- but make sure you ask him or her specific questions. This generally leads to the best conversations possible.
• Many researchers appear in Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is not an appropriate source, but each article has a list of references at the bottom. If you scroll down the reference list, you will often find articles that include biographical information.
• Talk with your professor if you're still running into trouble. The two of you can often find solutions together.

Here is the basic order in which info about a scholar appears in media.

• Web pages (personal, departmental, professional organizations)
• Scholarly articles by the person
• Scholarly articles referencing the person's work
• News articles
• Book chapters by the person
• Scholarly articles discussing the person's work in more depth
• Books in the popular press
• Short biographies (anthologized)
• Book-length commentaries (biographical or critical)

Newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and journals frequently profile famous and historic figures. Find those articles using the Library's databases.

Search for the word biographies, biography, or obituary combined with the name of a person, such as Julius Caesar biography. Use another descriptive word or phrase if you don't have a particular person in mind, such as biographies photographers, for example. 

Nearly all of the Auraria Library article databases contain some biographical information.  Here are a few examples of databases you might try:

Find videos in streaming and physical formats that focus on the lives of individuals.

Below is a sampling of biographical videos.