Biographical Portal
The Biographical Portal is a free online index to biographical reference works in the German language area. Intended to facilitate access to reliable biographical information, it contains entries for more than 160,000 biographies of persons from all social backgrounds and nearly all periods of German, Austrian, Swiss, Slovenian and South-East European history.
The portal is a joint project of the Bavarian State Library, the Historical Committee at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Foundation Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Slovenska Biografija is published by Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The project is financed by the founding institutions, and access is free.
Index
The portal provides a common index to the following reference works:- Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
- Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815-1950
- Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz
- Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon
- Rheinland-Pfälzische Personendatenbank
- Sächsische Biografie
- Surname and forename
- Year of birth and/or death
- Profession
From the search results, users can access the full text of the biographies, either directly or via another site. An advantage of the common index is that it allows users to compare differences in biographical entries and supplement the information in one lexicon with that in others. Further national and regional reference works are planned for future inclusion in the portal.