Restricted Full Count IPUMS Data

• General
• Citation
• Licenses
• License Fees
• Application Process
• Researcher Terms

General

The IPUMS full count data collection has been made possible through collaborations between IPUMS and genealogical organizations, with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The majority of the data were transcribed by Ancestry.com and shared with IPUMS under a data agreement that allows us to disseminate the data to the research community in two versions. (1) Full count data are freely available from IPUMS USA for research and educational purposes, but these data are all coded and do not contain names. (2) Users who need string variables—such as name, street address, or other raw variables used to create the coded data—can apply to use a restricted version of the data.

Citation

Steven Ruggles, Matt A. Nelson, Matthew Sobek, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, J. David Hacker, Evan Roberts, and J. Robert Warren. IPUMS Ancestry Full Count Data: Version 4.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2024. doi:10.18128/D014.V4.0R

Licenses

We offer three options for access to the restricted data. All options below require completing an application. The 100% and 20% licenses require a data security plan and a data agreement signed by an institutional representative. Please contact us at ipums@umn.edu for more information and license availability.

• 100%: This license contains all of the variables and records from the full count datasets. These licenses are designed to support multiple projects hosted at one university or organization. We can offer a limited number of new licenses per year in this category, and we may restrict these to institutions with several researchers and projects.
• 20%: A 20% license contains all of the variables and requires that the records you select must be less than 20% of the population for a given year. For example, a sample of New York state would qualify, because residents of New York were about 10% of the U.S population in 1940.
• Virtual Enclave: For researchers who require all of the records but are only a single researcher/project, we offer access to our virtual enclave. This option contains all of the variables and records, but the data are maintained at IPUMS.

License Fees

Starting in July 2024, annual fees will be required to maintain an active license. The time required to support the restricted licenses is taking away from time on data improvements, and fees will provide ongoing support to manage data licenses and user queries. We are finalizing the details, and will coordinate with institutional contacts to reduce interruption to researchers with access under current licenses. Fees will be scaled with the number of approved researchers accessing the data at your institution.

Application Process

A general overview of application requirements is below. Contact ipums@umn.edu to request application materials or ask questions.

New Licenses

1. Data Application: This is the general data application where you will specify the institutional contact (a higher-level representative of the department or institution where the data are housed), the agreement contract (person responsible for day-to-day management of the data), and the data security plan.
2. Research Project Application: This describes the proposed research project and must be submitted for each separate project under the license.
3. Researcher Agreement: This agreement must be signed by each researcher accessing data under a license; researchers working on multiple projects under the same license only need to complete one researcher agreement.
4. Institutional Agreement: The form finalizes the agreement and requires signatures from the institutional representative and IPUMS. This form is only signed once the data security plan, application, and projects have all been approved.

Existing Licenses

• When applying for a new project under an existing license, applicants only need to submit the Research Project Application and Researcher Agreement for review.
• When requesting to include a new researcher on an existing project, the new team member must only complete the Researcher Agreement for review.
• Researchers work with their institutional contact for the IPUMS license to submit these forms.

Additional Details

• Note that some institutions may require additional application materials internally to access the IPUMS Restricted Full Count data.
• Projects submitted by graduate students require a faculty advisor as the primary investigator on the project.
• All data agreements are with the university, not the specific college/unit that applies for access to the data. Researchers affiliated with the university but not the college/unit that stores the data must be granted access (pending IPUMS approval).

Researcher Terms

All approved researchers using the restricted IPUMS Ancestry full count data collection have agreed to the following terms:

• I have reviewed the terms of this IPUMS Restricted Full Count Data agreement, including the data security requirements and data protection plan specific to my institution, and I will fully comply with these terms.
• Data cannot be shared with researchers who have not been approved and signed this agreement.
• I must store any copies of the data within the secure environment established for this dataset.
• Data cannot be stored on a portable device and may never be emailed.
• Research results, statistical summaries, or analysis may leave the secure environment for research purposes.
• Any presentation or publication of research results, statistical summaries or analysis must include the appropriate citation.
• I cannot publish or distribute any portion of the dataset without approval from IPUMS, including journal replication. Contact ipums@umn.edu with questions or requests to redistribute the data.

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