World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online

The microfiche edition of K.G. Saur's Biographical Archives has been digitized and issued as a group of  databases known as the World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online. Reference works including biographical lexicons, encyclopedias, and monographs dating from the 16th century up through the 1990s are the sources of over seven million biographical entries and articles on more than five million people from various countries from the 4th millennium B.C. to the late 20th century.

Digitization of the microfiche, at  least parts of which are held by many academic libraries, was completed in 2010.  The publisher, Walter de Gruyter, reports the number of separate archival database groupings as 47 or 58, depending on how separate parts and supplements are counted.  The archival databases groupings represent twenty-five different countries and regions (including Africa, America, Scandinavia, South East Asia, etc.). There are also five different thematic groupings: Arab Islamic; Christianity; Classical World; Middle Ages; and Jewish. 

The entries in the thematic groupings supposedly do not significantly repeat the entries from the various country and regional archives. But, as demonstrated in examples from the publisher, the geographic divisions of the archives are actually based on the origin of the biographical reference sources, apparently not on the native origins of the persons chronicled. So entries on American author and humorist Mark Twain appear not only in the American archive volumes, but also in the Jewish, Turkish, and African database archives.  Searching under the author’s birth name (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) cites entries in the American and British archives.

The great variety in types and dates of information sources, which shift perspectives over time, is touted as a strength. While some sources date back to the late 16th century, a great number of the reference sources date to the 19th and 20th centuries. The end dates for the databases vary, but none date after 2001. There are no plans at present for further supplements.