The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International is a data project based out of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Through collaboration with national statistical offices and international data archives, the MPC collects, harmonizes, and publicly disseminates International census microdata for educational and scholarly use via its website https://international.ipums.org/international/. Preservation of census data is a key component of the work done by MPC. The Center regularly salvages older census data stored in outdated, analog or deteriorating formats. By transferring these data to a more stable and widely-available format the MPC makes the data accessible and ensures its preservation for future researchers.
MPC work on the IPUMS project involves coding the data and documenting it so the information is comparable for all countries and all years. Users of the database can create customized data extracts from both integrated (harmonized) and unharmonized variables by selecting population and housing variables from a single census or from multiple censuses across countries and years. For each census IPUMS provides a sample description, sample design summary, and the original enumeration form and enumerator manual as well as English translations of the documents. Currently data from 277 censuses from 82 countries is available and new data sets are released each year. Censuses in the database date from 1960 for the countries of Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Netherlands, Panama, and United States up to the 2011 censuses for Austria, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, France, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Uruguay.
The MPC is engaged in a similar data project for United States census data, http://usa.ipums.org/usa/.
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