The IPUMS Document Collection: Progress and Prospects

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 are preserving these unique pieces of census and survey documentation, creating bibliographic records that support the use of controlled vocabularies to enhance findability for the project staff and external 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instructions, supervisor instructions, training materials, codebooks, publicity, reports, newspaper clippings, unpublished papers, census timetables, data processing materials, and technical manuals. In June 2023 IPUMS internally launched the IPUMS Document Collection using metadata from a single region, Oceania. PDF documents and metadata from this region served as a test dataset to represent the quality and content of the metadata records and to evaluate the ability of these records to support the functionality of the web interface. In October 2024, the region of Africa was added to the IPUMS Document Collection, and the URL became discoverable at ipums.org. The collection now contains over 7,900 searchable and downloadable documents. The region of Asia is forthcoming in 2025, with Europe and the Americas to follow. This poster will: present the workflow process and progress on the IPUMS Document Collection; provide information on the use of controlled vocabularies to filter content; and raise questions to obtain helpful feedback from conference attendees.