Database of the Month: American FactFinder

American FactFinder is a web tool provided by the United States Census Bureau that offers access to some of the Bureau’s largest data sets, including information from the Decennial Census, American Community Survey, Economic Census and Population Estimates Program. American FactFinder helps you find population, economic, housing, industry, and business data about the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island Areas. Many of these statistics are broken down at the national, state, county and place levels. On January 20, 2012, American FactFinder went through a major upgrade and now has a new look and features.

Searching American FactFinder

You can use the Quick Start box located in the middle of the screen to pull up tables or data files that meet your search criteria. You can search by topic or table or for a specific state, county or place.  You may use the links on the left side of the page (under Search Using the Options Below) to browse topics, geographies, race and ethnic groups, or industry codes associated with the many different statistical data sets contained in the site. The data in American FactFinder comes from several censuses and surveys. To learn more about the individual surveys click on the symbol next to each table on the search results page.

Learn More About this Resource

Click here to discover more information about the new American FactFinder or to view an excellent (5 minute) virtual tour of this new service.  If you need any assistance using American FactFinder or any other library resources, please contact a Reference Librarian.

Connect to American FactFinder

American FactFinder is available at http://factfinder2.census.gov/. Please note: American FactFinder works best with Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. Other browsers may not perform as expected.

Database of the Month provides a very brief introduction to an important research database, highlighting key features of the database that you should know about. If you would like more information about this database (or any of the library’s databases) please contact the Reference Desk.  If you would like a demonstration of this database for a class, please contact our Coordinator of User Education, Elizabeth Galoozis.