april09ff.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 

Social search 
Aardvark is a new social search Web site that allows users to post questions and 
get answers from their friends, as well as friends of friends. By drawing upon 
the knowledge of your social network, Aardvark hopes that that you will be able 
to get more accurate, more relevant, personally tailored answers to subjective 
questions such as, “Where should I go for coffee in Durham?” or “Where is the 
best place to order library supplies?” As of this writing, the application is still 
in private Beta mode, but users can sign up to be notified when it goes public. 
vark.com. Retrieved March 10, 2009. 

Educational attainment 
Between 1970 and 2008, the percentage of the adult population 25 years of 
age and over who completed high school or more rose from 55 percent to 87 
percent. At the same time, the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree or 
higher increased from 11 percent to 29 percent. Between 1996 and 2007, the 
number of people earning associate’s degrees increased 27 percent, bachelor’s 
degrees 30 percent, master’s degrees 44 percent, first-professional degrees 14 
percent, and doctor’s degrees 32 percent. Females receiving all types of degrees 
increased at a faster rate than males. Between these same years, the number 
of bachelor’s degrees awarded to males increased by 25 percent, while those 
awarded to females increased by 34 percent. 
T. D. Snyder, (2009), Mini­Digest of Education Statistics, 2008 (NCES 2009­021), National Center for Education Statistics, 
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009021.pdf. 
Retrieved March 9, 2009. 

YouTube searches 
According to a report by TechCrunch, YouTube accounts for a quarter of the U.S. 
searches for its parent company, Google. If considered separately, YouTube would 
be the second largest search engine in the United States. The video-streaming Web 
site generated 2.73 billion U.S. searches in November 2008, putting it ahead of Yahoo, 
the second most popular search engine behind Google. As of November, Google’s 
market share was 63.5 percent of the U.S. search market. Yahoo had 20.4 percent, 
while Microsoft’s share was 8.3 percent of the U.S. search market. 
Erick Schonfeld, ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent of All Google Searches, TechCrunch, Palo Alto, California, December 18, 
2008, www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/18/comscore­youtube­now­25­percent­of­all­google­searches. Retrieved March 1, 2009. 

Museum funding 
Slightly more than 70 percent of U.S. museums are private nonprofi t entities; 
the rest are publically owned. For-profit museums comprise only 0.2 percent 
of the total numnber. Those museums receiving public funds reported a wide 
variety of funding sources, including federal, state, and local agencies. In 2006, 
federal support exceeded $149 million. Of this total, 44 percent was made up of 
congressional earmarks, 23 percent came from the National Science Foundation, 
21 percent from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 8 percent from 
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and 4 percent from the National 
Endowment for the Arts. 
C. Manjarrez, C. Rosenstein, C. Colgan, E. Pastore (2008), Exhibiting Public Value: Museum Public Finance In the United 
States (IMLS­2008­RES­02). Institute ofMuseum and Library Services. Washington, D.C. www.imls.gov/pdf/MuseumPub­
licFinance.pdf. Retrieved February 20, 2009. 

256C&RL News April 2009