CYBERPSACE HAS YOUR NUMBER\CD-ROM, Web make good calls.

Byline: Mike Langberg Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

My aunt recently wanted to find an old friend from her graduate-school days, a man who was living in Michigan when she last talked to him 15 years ago.

I popped a CD-ROM phone directory into my computer and found him in five minutes - in Tallahassee, Fla.

A quick phone call reconnected my aunt with her long-lost acquaintance, and they immediately arranged a reunion.

CD-ROM phone directories are playing high-tech Cupid for more and more such get-togethers, as well as helping small businesses put together mailing lists for a few hundred dollars that rival what mailing-list suppliers sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

The most important development in the directories is accuracy; most CD-ROM phone directories now appear to offer the correct listing - provided it hasn't changed within the past year or so - for 90 percent or more businesses and residences.

At the same time, prices are down. The high-end directories that sold for $150 to $200 in 1994 now cost $99; low-end products go for as little as $24.

And phone directories are finally moving into cyberspace. The first free source of phone numbers on the World Wide Web opened its virtual doors in mid-February, a month after free phone numbers became available for the first time to America Online subscribers.

All these directories work in essentially the same way: You enter the information you have - such as a person's name and the city where he or she lives - and get back listings that meet your criteria. CD-ROM directories are updated either quarterly or annually, so users have to keep buying the disks to stay current.

The first time you use an electronic phone directory, you feel as though you've broken shackles that you hadn't realized were holding you down.

You can instantly get the home phone number for every person named Anderson in Phoenix, for example, or find out how many people in Pennsylvania have the last name Zhang. With a high-end directory, you can also get the name and number for all the residents - who have listed numbers - on Easy Street in Mountain View, or produce a mailing list of every dentist's office in the greater Chicago area.

Electronic phone directories are much more forgiving than print phone books or directory-assistance operators. Want to find someone living in the New York metropolitan area whose last name is spelled "Daley," "Daly," "Daily" or "Dailey"? Doing the job the old-fashioned way would require plowing through phone books or calling operators in seven area codes spread across three states.

With a CD-ROM on on-line directory, you just type "Da(asterisk)y," where the asterisk represents a "wild card" search for any name beginning with "Da" and ending in "y," and summon listings for Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.

There are limitations, of course. The biggest obstacle is unlisted numbers, which don't appear in any electronic phone directory. About 20 percent of residential telephone numbers in the United States are now unlisted; the number is much higher in some urban areas, approaching 50 percent in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

The other significant obstacle is the maddening literal-mindedness of computers. Some directories, for example, will provide thousands of listings in "Saint Paul," Minnesota, but can't find a thing in "St. Paul." If you spell someone's first name as "John," you won't see any listings for "Jon" or "Jonathan."

Finally, there is the problem of update lag. The telephone companies won't provide their directory databases in electronic form to the companies that produce CD-ROMs and on-line services.

None of these problems is a show-stopper, however.

DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE

CD-ROM directories:

Digital Directory Assistance Inc. ([phone]; Web site: http://www.dda-inc.inter.net) is the standard-setter for the industry, with a family of products under the "Phone Disc" name.

Pro CD Inc. ([phone]; Web site: http://www.procd.com), which sells a line of CD-ROM directories with "Phone" as the second word in their names.

American Business Information Inc. ([phone]; Web site: http://www.abii.com) offers a family of second-rate CD-ROM directories with numbers in the name, including "88 Million Households Phone Book Deluxe," "16 Million Business Phone Book" and "2 Million Canadian Businesses Phone Book."

On-line directories:

Switchboard, a site on the World Wide Web at http://www.switchboard.com, gets four stars for the one simple reason: It's free.

America Online is a four-star contender with free white and yellow pages (Keyword "White Pages" and "Yellow Pages").

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO[ordinal indicator, masculine]CHART

Photo (Color) An on-line switchboard offers nationwide phone listings. Knight Ridder Tribune Box DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE (See text)