By Diana Magnuson
For a quarter century archival staff and the physical collection of IPUMS archival materials have sojourned in spaces on the West Bank at the University of Minnesota. The People’s Center on Riverside Avenue, the fifth floor of Heller Hall, 50 Willey Hall, 1200 Washington Avenue and the West Bank Office Building on South 2nd Street have all been home to the IPUMS Archive. These moves were embedded in the organizational growth, development, and change experienced by the IPUMS projects from 1999 to the present. Since 2004, IPUMS headquarters have been in 18,500 square feet of renovated space in Willey Hall on the West Bank. The space was a $1.8 million College of Liberal Arts funded remodel of an art gallery and restaurant. Now home to the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, which houses the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), IPUMS, the Life Course Center (LCC), and the Minnesota Research Data Center (MnRDC), the space currently contains six private offices, ninety-one cubicles, lounge spaces, and twelve conference room spaces, including a large ninety seat capacity seminar room.
The IPUMS Archive began in earnest with the launch of IPUMS International (affectionately known as IPUMS-I in some circles), which, as of this writing, includes 104 countries; 656 censuses and surveys, and over 1-billion person records. Beginning in 1999, with a social science infrastructure grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IPUMS International (IPUMS-I) had the ambitious goal to preserve the world’s microdata resources to democratize global access to these rich resources. In 2025, the project goals continue to be: collecting and preserving census and survey data and documentation; harmonizing these data; and disseminating the harmonized data free of charge.
Funding for IPUMS International included supporting the curation and preservation of ancillary qualitative materials received during data acquisition efforts. Since 1999, IPUMS-I has amassed tens of thousands of ancillary materials in support of its data harmonization work. These qualitative materials came from partner organizations: United States Census Bureau (USCB), the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Center (CELADE), the East-West Center, Centre Population et Dévelopement (CEPED), and over one hundred national statistical agencies. 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. The ancillary materials in the IPUMS collection attest to the varied technical, business, social, and economic aspects of conducting census and surveys across time and space.
Archival staff have preserved thousands of 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 outside users. It is likely that IPUMS-I uniquely holds some of these qualitative materials. In addition to materials used for IPUMS-I data harmonization work, materials were acquired that are broader than the IPUMS-I data collection and cover countries, censuses, and surveys for which IPUMS-I does not disseminate microdata. Free access to qualitative ancillary materials is available through documents.ipums.org. The online collection currently contains materials from the regions of Oceania and Africa, with Asia, Europe, and the Americas to follow.
The IPUMS Archive also preserves a number of smaller special collections adjacent to IPUMS harmonization work, including: IPUMS Institutional History, Minnesota Population Center Collection, Halliman Winsborough (1940/50 PUMS) Collection, a subset of the United Nations Population Division Book Collection, RAND Book Collection, US Historical Collection, Patty Becker Collection, Richard and Nancy Ruggles Collection, and Steven Ruggles Collection.
The new archival space at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation (ISRDI) at Willey Hall includes five hundred square feet of space devoted to over eight hundred linear feet of shelving, a scanning station, two student workstations, and an archivist workspace. The archive is also responsible for an historical exhibit space located in the Seminar Room at 50 Willey Hall.
The relocation of the IPUMS Archive to IPUMS headquarters will renew synergies that had weakened when the physical archive and its manuscript preservation work were separated in 2015 (along with the Historical Census Project team; also now at IPUMS HQ) from the daily hum of IPUMS headquarter activities including seminars, workshops, conferences, visiting scholars, and writing hunkers. Visitors to IPUMS headquarters will appreciate the meticulous attention to preserving, curating, and making discoverable these vital historical records.
