Specialist Services for the Transformation of Data held in Historical Census Volumes into Digital Data

Tender description

Office for National Statistics (ONS) is seeking to let a contract for the provision of a Specialist Services to transform data held in historical census volumes into digital data. This project is concerned with making greater use of historical census data, improving accessibility and realising benefits from the original investment in conducting historical censuses. ONS (and its various forebears) have produced population statistics from every Census since 1801. Individual census records are confidential for 100 years and are not included within the scope of this contract. ONS would like to digitise the aggregated data produced from those records and published in paper reports after each Census. Statistical outputs for England and Wales from the 1971 to 2011 censuses can be downloaded in digital form from ONS and other websites but a complete set of census data from the main volumes produced from 1801 to 1961 is not available digitally. All of the information is already publicly available (for example, through public libraries), but in paper form it has very limited accessibility and usability for analytical purposes. Digitisation would 'unlock' the data, extending the census timeseries backwards with detailed and comparable socio-economic data.