Census extends Lockheed contract
- By Judi Hasson
- Nov 30, 2000
The Census Bureau has extended Lockheed Martin Corp.'s contract to plan
for archiving information from the decennial count.
The bureau gave Lockheed, the prime contractor for the 2000 census, an additional
42 months to provide technical and management help to store the collected
census data.
The company will be responsible for planning how to transfer about 625 million
images of census forms from tape to microfilm. Federal law requires that
census data be stored indefinitely and made available to the public after
72 years.
Archivists face the perpetual problem of how to store the material because
most current forms of archiving last only a few years. Microfilm is one
of the few data storage materials that lasts for decades, even as the method
of viewing it changes.
Richard Taylor, a senior information technology architect at Lockheed, said
there is no rush to find a permanent storage method for census data because
new techniques are being developed all the time.
Meanwhile, with the success of the U.S. 2000 census under its belt, Lockheed
is taking much of its architecture to the United Kingdom, where it will
conduct the 2001 census. The United Kingdom will pay Lockheed $80 million
to conduct its census of about 59 million people