American FactFinder results

I was able to use American FactFinder to learn some useful demographic facts about the target audience for my library website (i.e., the residents of Norman, OK):
-They are substantially better-educated than the national average
-Only about 7,000 of a population of about 111,000 are born outside the U.S. (about 6%), so any linguistic minority communities are likely to be small
-The median age of a Norman resident is 29.9, which is pretty young--the median age in the U.S. as a whole is about 37

In some ways, this tells us a lot: we want to tailor our website to younger, fairly educated, English-speaking people. However, this search also demonstrates the limits of relying on statistical information without having a qualitative context. Norman, OK contains the main branch of the University of Oklahoma, which has about 30,000 students. These students skew the demographics reported in the census data from American FactFinder, but I don't really want to include them in my planning for my public library website, because they will likely be using the OU university library system and will not be using the public library. If I didn't know this information, I might over-tailor my site to people who were younger and more educated than the site's true audience.

I did not learn too much from this search that was broadly applicable to searching in general, although I learned some specific useful information about census data. One relevant, if somewhat obvious, thing that I did learn was to be willing to go back to an old search strategy if other things change: although Community Facts did not work for my mobile device search, it worked very well for my demographic information search.

Along the same lines, I also learned to remain flexible about what information you are searching for. Keep in mind your goal in collecting information rather than focusing too narrowly on the information itself--I thought I wanted mobile device data, but I was able to get useful information from demographic data even though at the beginning I would have considered that information 'irrelevant.'