Home > Telephone directory

In the U.S., courts have ruled (in Feist v. Rural) that telephone companies do not have a copyright on telephone listings, which has meant availability of innovative telephone directory services on CD-ROM and the World Wide Web.

A telephone directory may also provide instructions about how to use the telephone service in the local area, may give important numbers for emergency services, utilities, hospitals, doctors, and organisations who can provide support in times of personal crisis. It may also have civil defence or emergency management information as well as advertising.

A telephone directory may also be called a phone book or may be known by the colour of the paper it is printed on.

• White pages generally indicates personal or alphabetic listings.
• Yellow pages generally indicates a business directory classified by business type or services provided, often with paid advertising.
• Other colours may have other meanings: For example blue is used for government listings in some countries, green is sometimes used for government agencies.

A reverse directory, or criss-cross directory, is a telephone directory in which the entries are in order by address (first by city, then by street, then by house number), and were used to find out the name of a subscriber with a particular address or to find the neighbors of a particular address. They were fairly common until the 1960s as a separately published book, or sometimes included at the back of the regular telephone directory with each section on a different colour paper. Printed reverse directories have become less common with the availability of telephone databases on CD-ROM and on the Internet with advanced searching features.

They are not well known to the general public since they have generally been available on a limited basis to telephone companies or government officials, although genealogists and private investigatorA private investigator or PI, is a person who undertakes investigations. They often work for attorneys in civil cases or on behalf of a defense attorney. Many work for insurance companies to resolve claims. Before the advent of no-fault divorce, many privs know which public librariesLibrary and information science A public library is a library which is accessible by the public and is often operated by civil servants and funded from public sources. Public libraries exist in most nations of the world and are considered an essential par have them in their collection. In addition, some telephone companies have made the information generally available through little known services, such as the "2080 service" in Chicago (now discontinued), where a call to the exchange and the number 2080 produced an operator who would give the name and address of any other number in that exchange.

Instead of looking up a number, a call to directory assistanceDirectory assistance in telecommunications is a telephone call one can make to find out a specific phone number of a residence or business. Some systems also give the caller an address as well. The person or location must be listed in the local telephone ( 4-1-1In most of the United States and Canada, 4-1-1 has for decades been the telephone number for local directory assistance. In recent years, it has been used for long-distance directory assistance in most areas in the United States. The traditional number is in the NANP) will give the same results if a book is not available, however there is usually a significant charge for this.

Compare with:

• DNS
• WhoisWhois is a protocol for submitting a query to a database for determining the owner of a domain name, an IP network, or an autonomous system number. For instance a whois query on wikipedia. org results in the following: Domain ID:D51687756-LROR Domain Name
• LDAP

Links of Interest:

• Ed Charon