Wow! This was a hard but interesting assignment. I had several false starts as I am like a bull in a china shop when it comes to working with Excel spread sheets. I had to redo my project a couple of times due to a misplaced column or two, or missing a key function in the instruction. Kudos to Phil White and his video tutorials I don't think I could have gotten through the assignment without them. One of the things that took a bit of time was editing all the data. Once or twice I took out something I wanted to keep and had to go back to square one. Like I said I stink at spread sheets. For the assignment I picked Scotland County which is located in the south eastern part of North Carolina and I know from personal experience is an economically depressed area. One factor I was curious about was the education level of the population of Scotland County. 

Using the Census data and the other tools provided for in the assignment I located the two libraries that are in Scotland County and was able to create an area demographic table of percentages of education level within the county. So how could this information be useful to the local public libraries? For one thing based on the education levels a library could tailor its services to help with school work for their patrons and providing materials to prepare patrons for higher education. The local libraries could also assist in providing seminars on how to apply for college, how to find scholarships, grants, and loans, as well as computer training.  

Here are some of the statistics that one can find from the interactive map:

·        Overall for each of the Census locations High School level education or higher was less than 49% for those ages 18-24.

·        On average only around 8% of the population for Scotland County have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher.

·        On average around 80% of the population of age range 25 and up have at least a high school degree.