IPUMS International: Expanding Support for International Comparison and Data Access

IPUMS International contains an integrated set of census microdata samples from over 44 countries and 130 censuses. By providing detailed metadata and hierarchical harmonization at the variable level, IPUMS International supports international comparison of census related data on a world wide scale. A new cooperative project with the World Bank and Paris21 is completing the data/metadata loop with contributing countries by creating DDI documentation for the original data sets included in our collection and returning it to the country of origin. These DDI files can then be used with the IHSN Microdata Toolkit and locally held data files to provide new levels of access to microdata as well as create new aggregate tables. We will discuss the challenges of integrating metadata across such varied data samples, and the techniques developed to manage these challenges