i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This week's New Yorker recently featured an interesting article about phone books. Once a source for information retrieval, "its legitimacy as a reference tool was undermined long ago-- first by 411, then by the Internet and smartphones."

This article is interesting because phone books-- especially old ones, contain information that do not exist anywhere else-- not even on the Internet. Unfortunately, phone books are not being kept and preserved in their original form. In fact, "libraries and genealogy groups generally rely on microfilm" to look at these old books. If these microfilms are destroyed, will this information be gone forever? Charles Eric Gordon, a lawyer and owner of over 1400 old phone books, states that he uses old phone books to "track down lost heirs on behalf of family estates." Besides tracking down individuals, however, old phone books allow enthusiasts to look up different businesses that existed in the past (one person in the article looked up old fast-food chains in CT!). The phone book is an example of how information was standardized and organized in a way that would be retrievable by a user. Although the phone books mentioned in the article are old-- most of the listings irrelevant and out-of-date-- a present-day user can easily glean information from it, whether it be for work or for fun.

Lastly, this article also made me realize that perhaps not everything is searchable or retrievable via the Web. Did Gordon attempt to find lost heirs using the Internet first before using his old phone books? Or did he immediately resort to his phone books, knowing that the answers might not be on the web? How much, I wonder, of the past can and will be digital and eventually retrievable?

Unfortunately, the online article is only for subscribers. Please contact me if you are interested in reading this article.