Yes. Yes it is.
So a patron came to the desk looking for contact information for one Giada De Laurentiis. This turns out to be a celebrity chef type of person with a multi-faceted website that totally does not offer contact information of any kind. I dug through all the various tabs and site sections to conclude this. If the patron had been interested in signing up for the chef’s website, there’s a chance that a message could’ve been sent through that medium, but the patron was really looking for a phone number or snail mail address.
I kept looking, trying “giada de laurentiis” “contact” as a general search – finding her Wikipedia and Food Network pages, a site that purports to have her publisher’s address, but you need to sign-up to get the whole thing, and a Google Answers page that led me to WhoIs.net. I vaguely recall having seen this web database before, but I could definitely appreciate its usefulness in this context. The Google Answers page actually had differing information from what I found when I ran the search on whois.net myself; with over 2 years’ difference, it’s not surprising ownership has shifted a bit. I don’t know how “new” Giada De Laurentiis was in 2006, but apparently her husband bought/registered the site for her then and her company, GDL Foods, is who’s listed as the site owner now. I was able to give the patron both the then-contact information for De Laurentiis’ husband and the current information for her company.
Conclusion: WhoIs da bomb.
Tags: contact, domain names, giada de laurentiis, libraries, reference, registration, whois
