Electronic resources: 30 000 biographies of Tennesseeans now available online

Forty years ago the librarians at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville (USA) began an ambitious and arduous task. As the library collected books full of biographical information on famous and not-so-famous Tennesseans, the staff began creating a printed index of everyone mentioned in the books as a reference tool for researchers, scholars and anyone interested.

Launched as a paper index it now features more than 30,000 entries from over 90 books and for the first time beginning this month it has been transferred into a searchable index available online.

The index, which includes brief biographical profiles on clergymen to craftsmen and politicians to poets, is intended to help researchers and anyone else searching for information on notable Tennesseans find what they need before ever visiting the library. Some entries include a link to a photo and a digitized copy of the original biographical information when available. Among the editions are books entitled “Who’s who in Tennessee” (editions of 1911 and 1961), “Prominent Tennesseans 1796-1938”, while the complete bibliography of book titles and authors is available on the library’s website.