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FAST FACTS

C&RL News, April 2005
Vol. 66, No. 4

by Gary Pattillo

Women in higher education
Women continue to outpace men in undergraduate degree attainment. Women currently account for 56 percent of undergraduates. Projections to 2013 indicate that women’s undergraduate enrollment will increase to 8.9 million, representing 57 percent of undergraduates.
Katharin Peter and Laura Horn, February 2005, “Gender Differences in Participation and Completion of Undergraduate Education and How They Have Changed Over Time (NCES 2005–169),” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005169. March 1, 2005.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an interactive free encyclopedia on the Internet that began in 2001 and contains 500,000 articles in English. By contrast Encyclopaedia Britannica offers 80,000 articles and Encarta offers 4,500. Wikipedia is continually edited by more than 16,000 contributors. There are also editions in 75 other languages; the total Wikipedia article count in all languages tops 1.3 million. As its content is constantly changing and not necessarily accurate, some detractors have described it as a “free-for-all.”
Daniel H. Pink, “The Book Stops Here,” Wired, Issue 13.03, March 2005, www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html. March 2, 2005.

Freedom of Information
“The total number of security classification decisions jumped 75 percent, to 16 million, in 2004, according to statistics compiled by the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the federal government’s National Archives and Records Administration that is charged with monitoring classification of secrets.”  It costs nearly $7 billion each year to protect federal records from disclosure, not including costs for the intelligence community, which are secret.
Rebecca Carr, “Your Right To Know: Cost, volume of government secrets explode,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution. March 15, 2005, News; Pg. 1A.

Google Scholar preferences
Google Scholar has added “Institutional Access” preferences to its experimental search engine. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature from academic sources. The new preferences—described as “a small pilot project”—allow users to select up to three institutions to determine if an article is available to them via an institutional subscription. Twenty-one institutions are listed as of this writing.
Google Scholar, scholar.google.com/scholar_preferences?prev=/. March 3, 2005.

Book publishing industry trends
Net sales for the entire U.S. publishing industry are estimated to have increased by 1.3 percent from 2003 to 2004 to a grand total of $23.72 billion, according to figures just released by the Association of American Publishers. Sales of professional and scholarly books were up 2 percent in 2004, with sales of $4.06 billion.
Association of American Publishers, “Book Publishing Industry Net Sales Totaled $23.7 Billion in 2004,” February 24, 2005, www.publishers.org/press/releases.cfm?PressReleaseArticleID=247. March 1, 2005.

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