Canadian Census Data Discovery Partnership (CCDDP): Building a comprehensive inventory for open discovery and pathways for sustainable stewardship
Thursday May 15, 2025
From 2:30pm to 2:45pm
The Census of Canada is a key data source available to Canadians to support both contemporary and historical research. However, much of the historical census data in Canada is scattered across various collections including archival census returns, print census volumes, maps, data tables, and born-digital data files, which remain challenging to find and access. Discovery and access is distributed across a range of portals and platforms offered by government, archives, libraries, and academic research projects. Seeing a need for collaboration and coordination to support access to historical census materials, the Canadian Census Data Discovery Partnership (CCDDP) was formed in 2021. CCDDP is a multidisciplinary collaboration involving academic libraries, government archives and data custodians, and the research community, aimed at improving discovery and access to contemporary and historical census data. The project’s vision is to build an open, bilingual discovery portal for census data going back to the first census conducted in the pre-Confederation period. This presentation will provide an overview of the project’s activities including compiling a comprehensive census data inventory, assessing user needs for a discovery portal, and developing a preliminary prototype for the discovery portal. We will discuss the metadata and technical decisions we have made, highlighting some challenges, as well as the next steps for the project. This presentation will demonstrate how to find and access census collections using the CCDDP’s discovery portal prototype.
Speakers
Data Librarian and Acting Head, Map & Data Library
University of Toronto Libraries