Behind every printed national biography is a board of editors responsible for finding established scholars to write the biographies. The personal and institutional networks, the scientific and ideological socialization of these authors have a significant influence on the biographical constructs and narratives they have designed, and thus also determines the information contained in the biographies. Therefore, a source-critical approach to such biography texts is necessary. This will be exemplified using a biography selected from the Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815–1950 (ÖBL). A complementary approach for the interpretation of biographical dictionaries is analysis of the networks, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the information contained in the biographies. As part of the APIS project, biographical data is generated through the annotation of biographies of the ÖBL. This data consists of frequently mentioned names of persons, places and institutions that can be subsumed under the term “biographical building blocks”. Biographical networks can be built on the basis of this data. In the second part of the paper, different dimensions of these networks as well as ways of analyzing this type of data will be shown
