 Welcome to a short training video on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. By the end of this video you should be able to search for people and find out lots of information about them. Before the video starts, just a quick heads up. They are often shortened to D&B or Oxford D&B on both the website and during this tutorial. So first, we will look at how we access D&B. You could already be familiar with this web page as it's the first one when you log into the library computers. If you're accessing at home, you can find this web page through the library website which is found on your library card. In the top left tile is the A to Z or reliterate resources and you will go ahead and click on this which will take you to an alphabetical list. We need to scroll down to D, D for the Dictionary of National Biography which is there and it's expanding and we would then go ahead and click on this as well. The single asterisk before it means that you can access it at home as well as in the library. This will take you to a page that will look similar to this. With perhaps different pictures in the middle and on the right. The main purpose of D&B is to look up information on historic or famous people who have died on or before 2012. This means if they are still alive like the Queen or Elton John they will not be on here. So to search, use the box in the upper half of the screen which is found there. For this example, we are going to search for the Duke of Wellington who was twice Prime Minister and victor at the Battle of Waterloo who type in Duke of Wellington and you either press enter or click on the word go. This will bring up a list of the people D&B has with that name. As we put the Duke of Wellington, he only has one Duke of Wellington on there and that is Arthur Wellesley who is the one we are looking for. So we would go ahead and click on this blue link and that will expand there to show you what I mean. Just his name there. You can now get a full biography of the person and sometimes a portrait as well. To navigate, use the scroll bar on the right or use the sub menus on the left which are expanding now. You can also print email and site and it will send you the entire article not just a link to it. So you could view it, you could print it off or view it offline as well. At the bottom of the article which you won't see on here just me is there you will find the author and this one is Norman Gash and you might want to check who is this and handily Norman Gash is also on D&B and you can find out from this page that he was a historian and he also went to the University of Oxford so that's why he was chosen to write that article. D&B does hold more contemporary people for instance Amy Winehouse the singer who passed away sadly in 2011. Her article is written by Chloe Govan who still being alive does not have a D&B record but through her agency's website we can find that she has written multiple biographies and is very knowledgeable on pop music. So a question going through your head now though is why not use Wikipedia? It's a very good question. Well, D&B actually can hold a lot more information than Wikipedia. For instance, the article from Wikipedia for our example the Duke of Wellington has only 12,000 words written whilst the D&B version has 28,000. You also don't have any idea who wrote the Wikipedia article. You can look up the contributor but they are hidden by a pseudonym whilst the D&B is written by named specialist authors some of which we've gone through earlier. And what will look better in a school report or a university essay? Oxford has a level of prestige and this carries over to their online resources. Wikipedia is almost universally non-accepted. So to recap, D&B is a reliable source for information on dead famous or historical people. It is useful for school or university research and it is better than Wikipedia.