Stewarding Our Resources: Building a Sustainable IPUMS Archival Document Access System

IPUMS International (IPUMS-I) is one of nine IPUMS data projects. Begun in 1999, IPUMS-I now contains 1.1-billion person records spanning over one hundred countries. The focus of IPUMS-I is collecting and preserving data and documentation, harmonizing, and disseminating data. As part of IPUMS-I harmonization work, tens of thousands of supporting ancillary materials came from United States Census Bureau (USCB), United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Center (CELADE), The East West Center, Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), and over one hundred statistical agencies. Archival staff have been preserving thousands of unique pieces of census and survey documentation, creating bibliographic records using an expanded Dublin Core profile that supports the use of controlled vocabularies to enhance findability for the project staff and users. Examples of this material include correspondence, maps, enumerator instructions, supervisor instructions, training materials, codebooks, publicity, reports, newspaper clippings, unpublished papers, census timetables, data processing materials, and technical manuals.

Preservation and dissemination of our data products is already part of IPUMS workflows. IPUMS current document access system is static and limited to international census forms and enumerator instructions. Expanding and deepening this search and delivery system will provide findability and accessibility to a rich set of supporting archival documentation that will illuminate census development and implementation processes across the world. For example, access to materials documenting the development of enumeration forms and procedures over time supports researchers’ understanding of how statistical entities responded to the challenges of collecting demographic data on difficult to enumerate populations.

Creating a sustainable, discoverable, and searchable access system for a broad range of archival census and survey materials will support the IPUMS mission to democratize access to the world’s social and economic data and support transformative scholarship.