1

Online Searching, 4th ed.

Chapter 9American FactFinder Search Example 2: Guided Search

pp. 198 – 201

Librarian’s Guide to

Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction

2

Finding the average commuting time for major cities in the United States using American FactFinder’s Guided Search

…on any other page

On the homepage…

3

4

(click

)

5

NOT this one…

This one

(this step con’t on next slide)

6

(select… click… fly over!...NEXT…)

7

(either SKIP or just click NEXT)

Race/Ethnic Group information isn’t part of our research inquiry here so -

8

At first glance, it looks like the same results appear repeatedly – look carefully at the Dataset names. What is different?

9

First 18 of many, many columns…

(lots of rows of other information before: )

Modify Table or Download (and then edit the table in Excel) are just what you need to filter out all the other rows (and maybe all the columns except “Estimate”) and see ONLY the “Mean travel time” for all (or a selection of) these cities!

10

(You will always be reminded if you make changes using Modify Table)

For the record: getting to just this set of data would be much easier if you downloaded it to Excel and removed the unwanted rows and columns there… hiding so many rows/columns is pretty tedious using Modify Table. ;)

11

Librarian’s Guide to Online Searching, 4th editionCultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction

End of this search example