The Historical Census Files Project at the U.S. Census Bureau

Todd K. Gardner, U.S. Census Bureau

The goal of the Historical Census Files Project at the U.S. Census Bureau is to construct a time series of easy-to-use, anonymized historical decennial census files and make these files available to researchers within the Census Bureau and to qualified researchers through the Census Bureau's Research Data Centers. In the first phase of the project, all of the microdata from the 1960, 1970, and 1980 decennial censuses were migrated from mainframe tapes to a UNIX environment and verified. These data files are currently available within the Census Bureau in ASCII and SAS formats with web-based documentation. The current phase of the project is to harmonize the historical files with microdata from the 1990 and 2000 censuses and create an integrated set of documentation for the entire database. Working in association with the Minnesota Population Center, this project follows the model of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS).