Record Linkage and Automatic Maintenance Activities

(NASS) mission is to provide accurate, reliable, and current agricultural statistics in a timely fashion. In order to achieve this goal, NASS needs a reliable and efficient list sampling frame of agriculture producers in the United States. In 1997, responsibility for the Census of Agriculture was transferred from the Census Bureau to NASS. In addition to the Census, NASS ’ annual survey program has grown to include economic and environmental statistics as well as production agriculture statistics. These growing responsibilities created the need to explore a way to more efficiently and effectively handle list maintenance activities. The paper provides an overview of NASS and its procedures for utilizing record linkage techniques for list building and list maintenance. It will briefly describe the way NASS reviews records and some of the features of its record linkage application. It will discuss current record linkage projects being utilized for maintaining variables such as gender, race, and ethnicity on the list frame and the use of record linkage to identify and resolve duplication