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Census 2000 Data

Overview | Online Access | Commercial Census Products
| Networked Census Data at NCSU | Assistance

Overview

Decennial Census data are derived from a survey of every United States citizen and household carried out every ten years by the U.S. Census Bureau. Much is available online but the Libraries also has additional resources that go beyond that.

A related geographic data set for GIS mapping, TIGER/Line®, is used to locate census areas (e.g., Census Tracts, Block Groups).

Please Note: For the most recent Census Data, consider using American Community Survey data if it is available for your location of interest.

Online Access to Tables, Maps, Reports, & GIS Data

American FactFinder
American FactFinder (AFF) gives quick and interactive access to summary data, reports, and maps from Census products. It helps the user find statistics and create data extracts and custom tabulations online. It can summarize information for geographic areas, provide comparisons between geographies and generate reference and simple thematic maps online. AFF is designed to simplify queries, but it does have limits (7,000 geographies and 50 tables in any one search) and complex data analysis is not practical. American Community Survey, Census 2000, and Census 1990 (except block level*) data are available from AFF, as well as data from other Census Bureau surveys and programs. *The Census Bureau has removed the 1990 block level data from FactFinder. It is available, however, from CensusCD 1990 Blocks.

FactFinder provides access to those cross-tabulations of variables the Bureau makes available. Providing additional cross-tabulations would be impractical on a large scale. The demand for some way to generate custom cross-tabulations has been such, however, that the Bureau has developed a tool for that purpose. The Advanced Query System (AQS) is not available to the general public, but as an affiliate of the State Data Center program, Data Services can run tabulations for NCSU faculty, staff and graduate students. Availability of any given cross-tabulation is not guaranteed due to federal confidentiality restrictions. Contact Data Services for more information about AQS.

Census 2000 Gateway
The Census 2000 Gateway is the official web site for all Census 2000 products, and provides raw data downloads, information, summary tables, highlights by state, corrections, documentation, news, education resources, a glossary, and much more.

TIGER/Line GIS Census Data
GIS users can download for free Census 2000 and some 1990 TIGER/Line Data in shapefile format from ESRI for an area of interest. Users can choose multiple data layers for a single county or a single data layer for multiple counties and analyze them. The layers available as well as included attributes have been increasing over time, making this a valuable resource for GIS Census data. Use the Stfid field in the attribute table to join other data tables from American FactFinder, the State Data Center, or other sources.

The Census Bureau distributes the latest TIGER/Line data at their TIGER web page but see our libraries' TIGER page for information about how these files differ from what ESRI provides.

Census Bureau Map Products
Large format (3' x 3') maps may be downloaded as PDFs from the Census Bureau and plotted in the Digital Media Lab. 1990 maps are also available there.

North Carolina State Data Center - Census Lookup
The State Data Center provides web-based extraction of North Carolina Public Law, SF1, and SF3 data, through their online NC Census Lookup application. Commuting and migration reports are also available, as are 1990 profiles. An additional module presents SF4 occupation data to provide a rough comparison for individual counties with the EEO data (click here for more information). Additional information is available through their Census web site (maps, direct links to NC corrections, economic and health insurance tables, etc.) and the LINC database (state-to-state comparisons, some data from the 1980 and 1970 decennial censuses, and more).

ICPSR
NCSU is a member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR is making Census 2000 products and documentation available for download, as well as SPSS and SAS code for reading the raw files. Access is limited to NCSU affiliates on-campus. To learn more about ICPSR-related services at the NCSU Libraries see our ICPSR Data Services page.

Commercial Census Products

Added-value commercial CD-ROM products (GeoLytics) are available from the D.H. Hill Reference Department. They may be used on the GIS/Census workstations. See our Census CDs Page.

Proximity Information Resources provides a Census 2000 resource page at http://www.proximityone.com/cen2000.htm which includes access to Census 2000 data as well as free utilities. Cen2Shp software can be used to "extract data from Census 2000 data files and integrate these demographic data into map files (shape file dbf's)." ASC2DBF software "can used to convert Census 2000 ASCII files to dBASE4 structure."

Networked Census Data at NCSU

Census 2000 block-level GIS coverages for North Carolina are accessible via the Geodata server, or FTP to ftp://geodata.lib.ncsu.edu/cgia83/tig2000. The data coverages are organized into subdirectories by county. This data includes block geography and a limited set of Census 2000 attributes, including population (total and by age and race) and considerable household data. Additional attributes can be joined to these shapefiles by downloading a table from the web (see above sources) or extracting data from the raw files, and joining using the Blocknum field. These coverages were compiled from Census 2000 shapefiles and attribute extractions by NC CGIA.

Nationwide census data are included in the ESRI Data and Maps product.

Additional Census 2000 data will be made selectively available in the future. Most data should be downloadable from the Census Bureau or state/local agencies.

Assistance

For further information about GIS and census data please contact Data Services.

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