Frozen Film and FOSDIC Forms: Restoring the 1960 U.S. Census of Population and Housing

Abstract

In this article, the authors describe a collaboration of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), the U.S. Census Bureau, and the National Archives and Records Administration to restore the lost data from the 1960 Census. The data survived on refrigerated microfilm in a cave in Lenexa, Kansas. The MPC is now converting the data to usable form. Once the restored data are processed, the authors intend to develop three new data sources based on the 1960 census. These data will replace the most inadequate sample in the series of public-use census microdata spanning the years from 1850 to 2000, extend the chronological scope of the public census summary files, and provide a powerful new resource for the Census Bureau and its Research Data Centers.

Interoperable and accessible census and survey data from IPUMS

“…The data are easy to navigate, easy to obtain, well-documented, and easy to use. In many cases, IPUMS is the only source of a dataset that has been rescued from loss, recovered from frozen microfilm or moldy data tapes, and made available to researchers 13 , 14 .…”

Big Microdata for Population Research

“…Thanks to a recently completed Minnesota Population Center project to restore the 1960 census, complete long-form data covering 25 % of the 1960 population will soon be available through the RDCs (Ruggles et al 2011b). The RDCs also house American Community Survey data covering 47 million persons, with about 5.4 million persons added per year.…”

The Impact of Migration on Earnings Inequality

“…Regarding the exclusion of immigration information in the 1960 5 percent sample, IPUMS notes that this is a "restoration" sample that "includes restored data originally missing from 1960 PUMS," and as such, may be subject to more missing or inconsistent information than non-restoration samples(Ruggles, Schroeder, Rivers, Alexander, and Gardner 2011).15 The long-run decline in interstate migration documented by these studies arguably begins as early as the 1970s. However, given the presence of some missing data in the 1970s (in the CPS, as discussed earlier), as well as a positive spike in migration rates in 1990, I opt to focus on the 1980-2010 period for data validation purposes.…”