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Subject: [MNHENNEP] Census Data to be Available to Public
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 18:17:42 EDT

This article appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune this morning. Thought
it was worth sharing with those of you who don't read the Strib!

'U' wins big grant to make census data available to public


Wednesday, May 23, 2001


The University of Minnesota will announce today that it will get a major
federal grant to make U.S. census information since 1790 readily available to
researchers and the public.

The National Science Foundation has awarded the university's Minnesota
Population Center $4.7 million, one of the largest social-science grants to
be awarded in recent years.

The result will be a revolutionary advance for researchers working on a broad
range of topics, including residential segregation, population trends in
cities and rural areas, suburbanization and sprawl, university officials said.

"Right now it's difficult to easily and quickly compare local data even from
1980 to 1990, or 1990 to 2000, because of boundary changes," said John Adams,
chairman of the university's geography department. "Our goal is to allow
people to do that, by fixing the 2000 boundaries and then making all previous
data conform to them."

Much of the historic census figures exist only on paper or in obsolete
computer formats. Today technology has made it much easier to convert that
data into usable form, and the Internet has solved the problem of making it
widely available.

The data project will take the university five years to finish, Adams said.

Meanwhile, the accessibility of current data is much greater than it ever has
been. Both the Minnesota state demographer
(www.mnplan.state.mn.us/demography) and the Census Bureau (www.census.gov
[click on Demographic Profiles under the News header]) will have the latest
Minnesota data posted this morning.

-- David Peterson




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