IPUMS qualitative resources: Supporting robust social science research

Abstract

IPUMS at the University of Minnesota has created the world’s largest accessible database of census and survey microdata. The IPUMS suite contains nine harmonized census and survey microdata and aggregate geographic data products. In addition to archiving these data products, the IPUMS archival staff is also responsible for curating, preserving, and making discoverable three key pieces of qualitative IPUMS data: ancillary census and survey materials acquired primarily by IPUMS International for their data harmonization work; DDI-Codebook metadata and documentation produced during IPUMS data product preservation; and working papers authored by IPUMS staff documenting technical innovation around IPUMS data products. This paper describes the development of IPUMS infrastructure to manage, preserve, annotate, and disseminate its qualitative collection, tightly connecting these materials to the IPUMS quantitative data produced for the purpose of supporting robust social science research. The IPUMS archival staff has developed processes to receive, organize, tag, and distribute a large and diverse body of qualitative data. Attention to the range of processing and research uses of this qualitative collection has been instrumental in identifying useful tags to provide targeted access to support these uses. Operationalizing this work has informed archival organizational knowledge control and efforts to raise awareness of archival work and research possibilities for those who provide qualitative content in all its forms. These efforts support strong social science research and offer a path forward for archivists preserving qualitative data in an organizational setting in which archival curation, preservation, discoverability, and dissemination activities are essential, although often considered secondary to the main product.