The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) is a historical GIS project to create and freely disseminate a database incorporating all available aggregate census information for the United States

United States Census

The United States Census is a decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution. The population is enumerated every 10 years and the results are used to allocate Congressional seats , electoral votes, and government program funding. The United States Census Bureau The United States Census...

 between 1790

United States Census, 1790

The United States Census of 1790 was the first census conducted in the United States. It recorded the population of the United States as of Census Day, August 2, 1790, as mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution and applicable laws...

 and 2000

United States Census, 2000

The Twenty-second United States Census, known as Census 2000 and conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, to be 281,421,906, an increase of 13.2% over the 248,709,873 persons enumerated during the 1990 Census...

. The project has created one of the largest collections in the world of statistical census information, much of which was not previously available to the research community because of legacy data formats and differences between metadata formats. In addition, NHGIS has created cartographic boundary files compatible with every census, and over 50 million lines of metadata describing the collection. The statistical and geographic data are disseminated free of charge through a sophisticated online data access system.

NHGIS was launched in 2007 and is maintained by the Minnesota Population Center

Minnesota Population Center

The Minnesota Population Center is a university-wide interdisciplinary research center at the University of Minnesota. MPC was established in 2000, absorbing two earlier population research organizations...

 at the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

 and is funded by the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 and the National Institutes of Health

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

.

See also

• Great Britain Historical GIS
  Great Britain Historical GIS
  The Great Britain Historical GIS , is a spatially-enabled database that documents and visualises the changing human geography of the British Isles, although is primarily focussed on the subdivisions of the United Kingdom mainly over the 200 years since the first census in 1801...
  
  
• Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)
  IPUMS
  Integrated Public Use Microdata Series is the world's largest individual-level population database. IPUMS consists of microdata samples from United States and international census records...
  
  

External links

• Project homepage
• Citations of the project in Google Scholar
• Historical Geographic Information Systems Online Forum on Google