Demographic data for a changing nation

NHGIS provides current and historical US census tables and GIS data. The NHGIS project began in 2001 at the Minnesota Population Center, a unit of the University of Minnesota, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The project had an ambitious goal to collect, format, and freely disseminate all available aggregate census information for the entire country from the past 220 years. Easy access to historical census data in a GIS-ready format is a big step forward, but for many change-mapping projects, there remain two hurdles to clear: linking variables and linking geographies across censuses. As the NHGIS time series rollout continues, planners and other GIS users will find they no longer need to battle with changing census codes and boundaries when preparing a temporal analysis. The data output options include three formats, one each for GIS, spreadsheet, and statistical software, which means you do not have to spend time getting it into a useable format.