MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
On 5/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
That's a great example of a non sequitur. It's usefulness won't be established by choosing one of the most common names as a straw man. Once you've established that a person lived at a particular address his continuing appearance in the phone books for a 15 year period is evidence that he may have lived there for that 15 years. Whether any information source will be useful depends on what we are trying to do with it. Why dismiss it prematurely?
Ec
Because you have no way of knowing whether the phone book is up-to-date. Even if the celebrity in question doesn't have a secret phone number, the encyclopedic merit of including phone book information is pretty much non-existent.
At least in North America phone books are annual publications, with a publication date like any other books. Each directory is as up to date as it can be for the publication date in question. I'm not saying that there are no limits to the utility of telephone books. They are, like encyclopedias, convenient first places to look for information, but a good researcher does not stop at that source.
Ec