oct08ff.indd


G a r y  P a t t i l l o  

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email. 
unc.edu 

Black male graduation rates 
More than half of Black males did not receive diplomas with their cohort in 
2005/2006. The one million Black male students enrolled in the New York, 
Florida, and Georgia public schools are twice as likely not to graduate with 
their class than to do so. Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, South 
Carolina, and Wisconsin graduated fewer Black males with their peer group 
than the national average. 
The Schott Foundation for Public Education, “Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and 
Black Males, blackboysreport.org/node/13. Accessed August 15, 2008 

reCAPTCHA 
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and 
Humans Apart) are used as a security measure on Web sites. They are put to 
dual use helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher 
scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition 
(OCR) failed to recognize. reCAPTCHA is software deployed by more than 
40,000 Web sites and has transcribed more than 440 million words. Currently, it 
is being used to help digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions 
of the New York Times. 
Luis von Ahn, Benjamin Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham, and Manuel Blum, “reCAPTCHA: Human­Based 
Character Recognition via Web Security Measures” (14 August 2008), Science, dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1160379. 
Accessed August 16, 2008. 

Academic Libraries: 2006 
The Academic Libraries: 2006 First Look report summarizes services, staff, 
collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in two- and four-year 
degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States. The nation’s 
3,600 academic libraries held 1 billion books, serial backfiles, and other paper 
materials, including government documents at the end of FY 2006. There were 
144.1 million circulation transactions from their general collections. Two hundred 
and twenty academic libraries held 1 million or more books, serial backfi les, 
and documents. During the same time period, academic libraries’ expenditures 
totaled $6.2 billion. 
B. Holton, L. Hardesty, and P. O’Shea, P. (2008). Academic Libraries: 2006 (NCES 2008­337). National Center for Education 
Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C. nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pub­
sinfo.asp?pubid=2008337 
released July 8, 2008. Accessed July 30, 2008. 

Archive-It 
As of September 11, 2008, Archive-It has collected 496,517,749 URLs for 543 
public collections. Archive-It, the service that allows users to create, manage, 
and search their own Web archive (cf. Fast Facts, January 2006) allows browsing 
and full-text searching of publicly accessible Web archives. 
Archive­It, /archive­it.org/. Accessed September 11, 2008. 

C&RL News October 2008  584