Demographic and Social Statistics

UNSD, in collaboration with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, is organizing a Regional Seminar on Census Data Archiving. The purpose of the Seminar is to provide a forum for sharing of national practices and experiences in archiving census data. It will provide a basis for assessing existing national archiving strategies and technologies used, as well as for identifying good practices and lessons learned in census data archiving. The Seminar will review major issues in archiving census data with a view to identifying challenges as well as considerations for formulating and implementing an effective national archiving plan.

The purpose of the Workshop is to present international standards for processing population and housing censuses and to highlight the significant additional capabilities of contemporary technologies and their use for census data capture and data editing. More specifically, the Workshop will: (1) Present revised international standards for conducting population and housing censuses, focusing on recommended core topics as identified in the United Nations Principles and Recommendations Revision 2; (2) Present and discuss contemporary technologies in census data capture, including the use of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), Optical Character Recognition/Intelligent Character Recognition (OCR/ICR), Internet data collection, use of handheld devices for data collection, (3) Discuss the process stages for data capture, (4) Present an overview of major commercial suppliers for data capture; (5) Present the principles and practices for census data coding and data editing; and (6) Present international standards for data documentation and archiving and corresponding tools. The workshop will also offer the possibility to the participants to present the experience of their countries in census data processing.