Biographies

A student may ask one of the library staff:

Where can I find a biography?

The most helpful answer depends on knowing what is needed for the class research assignment. We may reply:

That depends on the type of biography needed for the research project.

The noun biography derives from two Greek terms meaning life and writing. A biography is writing about a life. A biographer is someone who writes about a life. Among many other English words starting with the letters bio, meaning life, are

• bioacoustics
• biochemist
• biodegradable
• biodiversity
• bioengineer
• bioethics
• biofeedback
• biohazard
• biologists
• biology
• bioluminescence
• biophysics
• biopsy
• biorhythms
• biotech

To give the reader the most useful answer, it is useful to find out what sort of biography is needed. Usually a biography has some detail about a person’s life it can be a book or just a summary in a few paragraphs posted online. The source of a biography is important, since some books and online sources are not authorized biographies. We may ask the student:

Are we talking about some information on someone’s life, or a whole book?

How will the information be presented?

When we know how much material is needed, and for what purpose, we may suggest:

Start by looking up the person’s name by using the One Search function on the Thammasat University Library homepage. If the people were famous and still remembered today, then the TU Library may own items about them. If the student needs books or chapters of books, we should have a lot of information. We may advise the student:

If we just look for ebooks, then out search results will not contain book reviews, which we are not looking for.

If the subject of the biography is not so famous, then the student’s search can be more challenging. With Chinese and some Western people, names can be very common. For example, in England and America, the name John Smith is shared by many people. If we do a One Search request for John Smith, we get many responses. The student may be confused by having so many choices. The first suggestion we may make is as follows:

Try putting quotation marks around the name before trying One Search.

So, instead of writing John Smith in the One Search slot, we would write “John Smith.” This would make sure that the first and last names were being searched in the correct order. Also we might add:

Sometimes it helps to search by alternate names of some subjects. For example, Sakchai Bamrungpong was a diplomat, author and journalist who wrote under the pen-name of Seni Saowapong. When trying to find out biographical information on Sakchai Bamrungpong, it may be useful to search for Seni Saowapong as well. The same is true of Binlah Sonkalagiri, the pen-name of Thai author Wuthichat Choomsanit or Khamsing Srinawk, a writer from the Isan region who writes under the pen-name Lao Khamhom. Botan is a pen-name for Suweeriya Sirisingh, who was born in Thonburi in 1947. The novelist Sukanya Cholasueks is better known by her pen-name Krisna Asokesin. In all of these cases, if we are looking for a biography or biographical information for a thesis or academic research project, it is a good idea to try a search for the author’s birth name and pen name. Not only authors use different names. Sometimes performers and others also use different names than they were born with. If we are searching for the biography of someone who made a career in the military, the person’s rank or other titles may also be useful to include when tryng the One Search function. The student may interrupt us and wonder:

What happens if I get no results for someone’s name?

If there is limited biographical information to be found about someone, it may help to look for their profession and the word biography as well as nationality. For example, if we are looking for the biography of a Thai scientist whose name does not appear to bring up any results, we may try searching for

biography AND scientists AND Thailand

If we need to find out about a Thai philosopher, we may try the search:

biography AND philosophers AND Thailand

We should caution the student:

Remember that Romanization may be an issue.

As we know, sometimes there are different spellings for the same name of a Thai person in Roman letters. While we can trust the way the person chose to spell the name, this may not always be possible to find right away. For this reason, we may find information with a more general search which will give us the variant spellings of a name we might nothing otherwise think of.

Other approaches for the student may be to look closer at the person’s achievements. For example, if the person has won a major award such as the Nobel Prize or Fukuoka Prize, we may look on the website of the prize organization, which should include some basic information about the award winners. If books are not available about our subjects, there may be magazine articles about them.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)