Unlocking Archival Stories: Ipums Document Collection Use Cases

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 USCB, UNSD, CELADE, The East West Center, CEPED, and over one hundred national statistical agencies. The IPUMS Archive Team is 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 IPUMS project staff and users. Examples of these materials include correspondence, maps, enumerator instructions, supervisor instructions, training materials, codebooks, publicity, reports, newspaper clippings, unpublished papers, census timetables, data processing materials, and technical manuals.

The IPUMS Document Collection launched in early June 2023 using the Oceania collection as a test dataset and in October 2024 the Africa collection was added to the public deployment of documents.ipums.org. The challenge facing the IPUMS Archive Team is to simultaneously build out the online holdings and develop use cases for increasing the collection's visibility to the IPUMS international research community. This presentation will: 1) Briefly describe archival workflow to adopt a long-range strategy of acquisition, archival control, flexible metadata creation, adapting to institutional priorities, and scaling up archival deliverables to the IPUMS Document Collection. 2) Create use cases for research and teaching using qualitative materials in the IPUMS Document Collection together with IPUMS harmonized data by examining: development of questions over time within countries and/or across regions; difficult to enumerate populations through outreach; and specialized enumerator training for regional or national issues. 3) Invite feedback on appropriate metrics to measure and improve documents.ipums.org engagement.