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.
[2] The portal provides a common index to the following reference works: The index can be searched using the following criteria: The majority of biographies are in German, however the Swiss lexicon also has entries in French and Italian, while the Slovenska Biografija includes entries in Slovenian.
[3] 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.
[3] The newer German and Swiss lexicons reach into the present, but the ÖBL is limited to the period 1815–1950.