Thursday 6 December 2012

Redesign of American FactFinder

American FactFinder, the U.S. Census Bureau website, is undergoing a redesign that should be available early in 2013. Some of the proposed improvements include:

  • "Community Facts" - the easy tools on the Census homepage and AFF homepage of "Quick Facts" and "Population Finder" will be merged and replaced by a new tool called "Community Facts". Just enter the name of a state, county, city, town, or zip code in the search box to get summary data about that geography.
  • "Guided Search" will be the /new /second choice, and consists of easy-to-work through prompted searches for these choices: "I'm looking for information about people" "I'm looking for information about housing" "I'm looking for information about businesses or industries" "I'm looking for information from a specific dataset" "I want to search for a table number or a table title" The user clicks their choice, then follows prompts to their data. The order is from the most general to the most specific, and can be used by the entire range of Census data users, novices to experts.

"Guided Search" is the topic approach to AFF that the Census Bureau has been promising to develop since the redesign of AFF began in 2010. According to librarians who have been beta testing the new site, "You're going to like it."

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