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Lucy Bell, UK Data
Archive This presentation will describe the development of the one-stop Census Registration Service, an online system which will provide a seamless, user-friendly and simple registration procedure for access to all the varied resources from the 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001 UK decennial censuses. UK higher education institutions, through the UK Data Archive and the Universities of Manchester, Edinburgh and, more recently, Leeds, have been providing access to UK census data for over a quarter of a century. In that time, the data products associated with the 1971, 1981 and 1991 Censuses have increased dramatically so that they now total more than 50. This number will, of course, increase again with the release of the results from the 2001 Census. Such a wealth of resources provides the academic user with not only the use of many sophisticated datasets but also with a requirement to accept and fulfill the terms and conditions of the various licenses covering these products. A new single license for all 1971-2001 Census products is now in development. In line with this new license and in time for the results of the 2001 Census, the UK Data Archive has been funded by the ESRC and JISC to develop, implement and maintain the one-stop Census Registration Service to simplify the process of registering for these data products. This presentation will review the background to the project, explaining the need for such a coordinated service in light of the varied actual and potential uses of census data in higher and further education and the ways in which these are currently developing. It will also report the findings of a small-scale questionnaire survey of UK higher and further education staff undertaken by the paper's author which sheds light on their views of the old and new registration systems. Lastly, it will describe the new registration service in detail and highlight some of the lessons which have been learned during its development. Lucy Bell |