Digitization of the 1990 U.S. Census Group Quarters Records

David Bleckley, University of Michigan
Douglas Rosin, University of Michigan
Katie Genadek, University of Colorado Boulder

We describe our work digitizing 1990 U.S. Census Group Quarters records to support the creation of a new linked data file. Group Quarters (GQ) are the communal living settings like prisons, dormitories, and hospitals. While the rest of the 1990 Population Census records were retained as handwritten responses to a paper survey, the GQ records were stored as 65,000 microfiche images of condensed font printouts. These records covered about 6.6 million people across 142,000 GQs. We digitized the microfiche and extracted the data into linked data tables, capturing person- and GQ-level data. Using a combination of open source tools, this work required us to develop techniques to handle densely formatted data in a way that does not require tabular ruling lines. We demonstrate our approach using a sample image of synthetic data, created to portray the challenging nature of the GQ images but not based on actual census responses.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 203. Digitization and Linkage of the 1990 United States Census