Big microdata: the origins of IPUMS

Abstract

IPUMS is the world's largest population database. It provides individual-level data on the characteristics of 2.5 billion persons residing in a billion households drawn from over 3,000 censuses and surveys of 165 countries between 1703 and 2024. IPUMS receives a half-million data requests annually and disseminates 1.5 TB of data every day. There are over 300,000 unique users, and they have produced some 30,000 papers and 3,500 PhD dissertations using the data. This talk will describe how IPUMS got started three decades ago, explain key technological innovations that made it possible, and show some exciting new IPUMS initiatives that are just getting underway. At the end of this talk, there will be a short presentation of the new project at BSC on the Evolution of Household Composition, a collaboration between BSC Computational Social Sciences, the Centre d´Estudis Demogràfics (CED), and La Fundació Caixa. Albert Esteve, director of CED, and Juan Galeano, researcher at CED, will present the background and challenges of this cutting-edge world-wide project.