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GCN Home > May 7, 2001 issue

Census site makes quick work of stats

BY PATRICIA DAUKANTAS | GCN STAFF

How many people live in Oregon? An open-source Web site at quickfacts.census.gov serves up an instant answer: 3.42 million.

The Census Bureau designed State and County QuickFacts to present population data without the overwhelming detail of other Census Web sites, said Paul T. Zeisset, marketing director for the bureau’s Economic Census Division.

“Other places are trying to be the definitive resource, so they have to present all the raw numbers,” he said.

The www.census.gov site has multiple data sets for each U.S. county, “but in the past you needed to go to 10 different places to get all the data,” Zeisset said. The tables of statistics look daunting to an inexperienced visitor.

The bureau started developing QuickFacts based on users’ requests for a one-stop site with easy-to-decipher statistics about a particular state or county. Now, QuickFacts is becoming one of the chief pathways into the rest of Census’ data, Zeisset said.


QuickFacts creators, from left, Rachael LaPorte Taylor, Linda Morris, Paul Zeisset, Lisa Nyman and Mark Wallace made the statistical site easy enough for schoolchildren to use.
QuickFacts has the most recent figures in each data category, including Census 2000 tallies for such categories as overall population of states and counties. But some subsets of data from Census 2000—notably household statistics from the long forms sent to one in six residences—won’t be released until next year.

That’s why QuickFacts still contains data from the 1990 Census about household income and education levels, supplemented with 1997 estimates. Data on business activity comes from other bureau surveys taken during the 1990s.

Selecting a state from a clickable outline map or drop-down menu brings up a no-frills table that compares population and business statistics for a chosen state against corresponding data for the entire nation. From each state’s page, users can pull up similar tables for counties via three methods: clicking on a state map, using a drop-down menu or searching on the name of a community.

User-friendly

The bureau found that many Web visitors wanted information about a community but didn’t know what county it was in, said Lisa Nyman, a senior Internet technology architect at the bureau.



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