Telephone directory
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In telephony, a telephone directory is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organisation that publishes the directory. Subscriber names are generally listed in alphabetical order, together with their postal or street address and telephone number. Typically, every subscriber in the geographical coverage area is listed, unless the subscriber pays a fee for an unlisted number (in British usage, ex-directory). It can be published in hard copy or in electronic form.
Some subscribers can request the exclusion of their number from the directory. Their number is then said to be "ex-directory". This also means that their Caller-ID on outbound calls is blank.
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. There may be transit maps, postal code guides, or stadium seating charts, 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, sometimes called the A2Z, generally indicates a business directory classified by business type or services provided, almost always 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.
The first telephone directory, consisting of a single page, was issued on February 21, 1878. It covered 50 subscribers in New Haven, Connecticut. The Reuben H. Donnelly company asserts that it published the first classified directory, or yellow pages, for Chicago, Illinois, in 1886.
Under current rules and practices, cell phone and Voice over IP listings are not included in telephone directories. Eforts to create celluar directories have met stiff oppostion from several fronts, to include a significant percentage of subscribers who seek to avoid telemarketers.
Reverse directories
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 investigators know which public libraries 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. But such services remain online.
Instead of looking up a number, a call to directory assistance (4-1-1 in the NANP) will give the same results if a book is not available. However, there is usually a significant charge for this.
In the United Kingdom, Ireland and many other countries it is illegal to perform a reverse lookup from a phone number, although some companies have attempted to sell reverse directories. CD-ROM telephone directories supplied by telephone operators are now sold in an encrypted format that only allows lookups from a name and address.
Compare with:
See also
External links
- WhitePages.com (http://www.whitepages.com/)
- Online Telephone Directories Worldwide (http://numberway.com/)
- First Telephone Book (http://www.statoids.com/phonebooks/pbnh.html)
- SuperPages for U.S.A. (http://www.superpages.com/)
- SuperPages for Canada (http://www.superpages.ca/)da:Telefonbog
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