New Products! IPUMS GeoMarker and NHGIS APIs

The IPUMS spatial team is excited to introduce two new products that expand the ways you can access NHGIS data. IPUMS GeoMarker enables you to easily attach contextual characteristics from ACS data to address or point data, and the first public IPUMS API provides programmatic access to NHGIS data and metadata. Both products officially moved out of beta in December 2019. 

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New Year, New Me: IPUMS Bibliography

With a new year comes resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. Perhaps you have resolved to be more organized, appreciate the little things, or just reaffirm your commitment to using data for good-never for evil. Dream big because IPUMS wants to help you achieve your goals (unless you have again promised yourself that you will floss daily)! 

We recently resolved to outperform Google*. An ambitious team, led by Erin Meyer, set out to close the gap between citation counts in the IPUMS bibliography and Google Scholar. They scoured the internet to uncover your incredible research accomplishments that use IPUMS data. And oh did they find research! 

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In the Archive: “25 Years of IPUMS Data”

“25 Years of IPUMS Data,” the current IPUMS/MPC archive exhibit, highlights a dynamic quarter center history of data innovation at the University of Minnesota. In the late 1980s, the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s History Department proposed “the creation of a single integrated microdata series composed of public use samples for every year … with the exception of the 1890 census, which was destroyed by fire.”  The primary aim was to make the U.S. census microdata “as compatible over time as possible while losing little, if any, of the detail in the original datasets” (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: A Prospectus).

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