DUALabs
Encyclopedia
DUALabs was the name of an American company that created and disseminated microdata
Microdata (statistics)
In the study of survey and census data, microdata is information at the level of individual respondents. For instance, a national census might collect age, home address, educational level, employment status, and many other variables, recorded separately for every person who responds; this is...

 and aggregate data
Aggregate data
In statistics, aggregate data describes data combined from several measurements.In economics, aggregate data or data aggregates describes high-level data that is composed of a multitude or combination of other more individual data....

 files for the 1960 and 1970 censuses. The DUALabs 1960 census microdata file was noteworthy because it was designed to compatible with data from the 1970 census, allowing easy analysis of economic and demographic change between 1960 and 1970. The compatible DUALabs microdata inspired the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series which provides compatible census microdata for the period since 1850.

DUALabs used a proprietary compression algorithm to compress the 1960 and 1970 census data under NSF
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...

 grant 7249358 to the Center for Research Libraries. DUALabs also received funding for the project from the Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

 and NICHD (Contract 72-2707). This algorithm made wide dissemination of massive census files feasible for the first time. After DUALabs declared bankruptcy in the early 1980s, however, some data became inaccessible because the decompression software was not generally available to researchers. All DUALabs census data are now recovered, however, and are available through the National Historical Geographic Information System
National Historical Geographic Information System
The National Historical Geographic Information System is a historical GIS project to create and freely disseminate a database incorporating all available aggregate census information for the United States between 1790 and 2000...

 and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

The company was headed by former Census Bureau employee Jack Beresford (1931–1996), who had worked on the compilation of the 1960 census, and the company headquarters was in Rosslyn, Virginia
Rosslyn, Virginia
Rosslyn is an unincorporated area in Northern Virginia located in the northeastern corner of Arlington County, Virginia, north of Arlington National Cemetery and directly across the Potomac River from Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Rosslyn encompasses the Arlington neighborhoods of North Rosslyn...

.
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