A vast work giving you detailed biographies, written by experts, on 55,000 people who shaped British history worldwide, from the 4th century BC to 2002
 

• Covers not just the 'great and the good', but people from all walks of life who have left a mark for any reason, good, bad, or unusual
• Does not include living people
• Also has 10,000 portrait images, such as photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures
• Includes a 'Themes' section giving reference lists of popular categories of people plus feature essays on many varied topics
• Online updates are added three times a year
• Includes a Bedfordshire page that you can view without logging in
• Keep up with new ODNB biographies and features at What's new

 ODNB tips

• You can search for a specific person or you can browse through biographies alphabetically
• You can do a simple 'Quick Search' to search for an a biography of someone by name or to search for a word or phrase anywhere in the text of all the pages
• Before you start a 'Quick Search', click the 'Search tips' link on the ODNB web site and take a look at section 4 of the 'Help table of contents'
• You can also search by many other features, such as date of birth or death, field of activity, place and religious affiliation
• To make the most of all the extra search features, click the 'Search tips' link on the ODNB web site and take a look at the 'Help table of contents' from section 6 onwards
• To find an image of someone, just search for a biography of that person. If there is an image available it will be on the biography page
• You will see that there is also an 'Image' search option, but that searches for ODNB images by specified artists, not for images of a particular person
• Click 'Themes' on the ODNB home page to see reference lists such as kings and queens, prime ministers, Nobel prize winners and 'Musical chart-toppers in the Oxford DNB', 'Olympic title-holders in the Oxford DNB' and 'Holders of the Victoria Cross in the Oxford DNB' and many more
• Click 'Themes' on the ODNB home page to see feature essays such as 'Ask a woman: women in high politics 1700 - 2000', 'British entrepreneurs and brand names' and 'Eighteenth century India', 'The Fire of London' and 'Life on the home front' and many more
• Without needing to log in you can go to two free ODNB services: Free Oxford DNB for various free features such as a monthly online ODNB magazine and a selection of biographies and feature articles; and the Oxford Biography Index, a freely available index of notable people from British history, at present containing over 55,000 entries
• The online ODNB is a completely new edition of the original printed Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) but it also includes all biographies from the original DNB (which began publication in 1885)
• At the three big libraries, Bedford Central, Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard, you can also see the 60-volume printed set of the new ODNB