Electronic Dissemination and Support of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series

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This award supports electronic dissemination of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The project is partially funded by NICHD. The IPUMS is the world's largest public-use demographic database, containing approximately 69 million records for the U.S. census over a period of 140 years. The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) is transforming the nature of electronic data dissemination just as the proliferation of fast personal computers and UNIX workstations has revolutionized data analysis. This project capitalizes on both of these developments by making the largest and most powerful population database readily available for analysis on desktop machines. The project is composed of two complementary elements. The first entails the development of a data extraction system for use on the WWW. The interactive Java-based extract system will incorporate a variety of advanced features enabling researchers to customize their data extracts. The second element of the project involves the translation of the IPUMS documentation into hypertext format to facilitate navigation. The system will be designed in coordination with leading data archives and population centers at the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. The population centers of both of these universities have agreed to support the extraction system indefinitely. Moreover, these institutions, together with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, will provide advice on the design and implementation of the system. This project will be a key multi-disciplinary resource in the research infrastructure of the social sciences. The significance of the proposed project is not limited to the support and dissemination of the IPUMS; it can serve as a model for the distribution of microdata more generally. Dß