Alternative Ways of Presenting Historical Census Data

In 1997, the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services in cooperation with other research institutes initiated a digitalization of Dutch censuses held between 1795 and 1970. Among other things, the project resulted in a Web site with all the tables and the additional information. Furthermore several hundreds of the tables were scanned, OCR'd, and subsequently transformed into Excel tables. Recently we have conducted a preliminary investigation into alternative ways to disseminate the data, i.e., via Nesstar. This application offers the possibility to present geographical data in a map and conduct analyses and calculations online. But whereas the initial project's primary objective was to be as historically accurate as possible, data need to meet other requirements to be suitable for Nesstar. The presentation will cover the considerations that play a part in the decision about how to present the census data, the options that are available, and the problems that we encountered.