Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > February 7, 2000 issue

Census revs up 10,000 systems

Bureau spins IT web for 2000 count

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

To count all 275 million Americans in roughly six months, the Census Bureau has amassed more than 10,000 computers, ranging from PCs to a supercomputer.

Besides the bureau headquarters in Suitland, Md., Census 2000 will depend on the work done by four data capture centers, 12 regional Census centers and 520 local offices.

The current decennial census will rely more on off-the-shelf technology and outsourcing than the last nationwide head count in 1990—and on many leased systems, too.


The Census Bureau will converte data to an electronic format for the 2000 decennial census."


For the first time, an image-capture system will help process poorly completed forms and save Census workers from having to do time-consuming rechecks against original paper forms.

And, when Census 2000 is complete, the bureau will merge the results into its online data dissemination system.

For the 1990 decennial count, the bureau set up and managed seven temporary data capture centers, said J. Gary Doyle, Census 2000’s manager for systems integration. This time, the bureau hired contractors to build and run four data capture centers, or DCCs.

Ten years ago, the bureau captured census forms onto film, which was scanned into VAX 8500 and 8810 minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corp. Bureau workers had to type in any handwritten information, Doyle said.

No more illegibility

This year the four DCCs will use optical character and mark recognition systems to read in data and store facsimile images of forms.

No longer will Census workers dig out the original paper forms to deal with bad handwriting or poorly marked bubble choices, Doyle said. Instead they will look at images on a monitor to sort things out.

Each DCC has nine Docutronix 2000 envelope sorter-readers from Docutronix Inc. of Homestead, Fla., and 30 9500D scanners from Eastman Kodak Co.

The DCCs—in Essex, Md., Jeffersonville, Ind., Phoenix and Pomona, Calif.—each house two Dell PowerEdge 6100 and two PowerEdge 6300 servers, each with 2G of RAM and running Microsoft Windows NT. Each DCC also has about 500 Dell GX1 desktop PCs, more than 50 Dell Precision 410 workstations and about 40 Precision 610s.



GCN Popup