EDINA newsline
September 2007: Volume 12 Issue 3
Census.ac.uk is the one-stop location for all academic Census needs; UKBORDERS remains the key resource for those requiring UK geographic boundary datasets – both census and non-census.
Census.ac.uk is the home of the ESRC Census Programme and allows users in UK higher and further education institutions access to data from each UK census from 1971 to 2001.
UKBORDERS is now the Programme's Geography Data Unit and provides a wide range of digitised boundary files and associated geographic boundary-based products: administrative, census, electoral, environmental (e.g. national parks, urban footprints), postal, historical and other boundaries (e.g. synthetic neighbourhood localities).
In addition, geographic look-up tables are important supporting datasets. These include the latest versions of the National Statistics Postcode Directory (NSPD) from the Office for National Statistics.
This dataset provides a valuable means by which events or occurrences (such as disease, crimes, customer residence etc) can be allocated from a postcode to another area such as an electoral ward or health area.
As part of the recent integration, metadata about data holdings in UKBORDERS has been made accessible for census.ac.uk to enable users to discover what data is available and from which support unit.
Users of UKBORDERS may have noticed minor differences and the inclusion of new data although the functionality remains exactly the same as before.
The Census Programme also comprises the following: