The British nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century decennial census returns are an invaluable historical source of information for the social and economic analyses of the Victorian and Edwardian period. Much of the history of the period could not be written without this source. From 1851 onwards the decennial British census returns contain vast amounts of comparable information on house and household structures, and, for each individual, on name, marital condition, relationship to head of household, age, sex, occupation, birthplace, and some medical disabilities. However, large-scale academic analysis of the manuscript sources has traditionally required time-consuming manual inputting of data from the census returns into computer systems for analysis which limits the scope, the geographical scale and the time periods of the research analysis that can be undertaken.
In recent years complete digitised datasets of the census enumerators’ books from the British census have been created by commercial bodies for their own, mainly genealogical, purposes. The I-CeM project is bringing together these existing computerised versions of the censuses in order to construct a standardised and integrated collection of census microdata for Great Britain covering the period 1851-1911. This integrated data collection is bringing together records for more than 35 million households and over 200 million individuals and on completion will be one of the largest historical datasets in the world. Once available, I-CeM will completely transform the ability of the academic community to research this period of social and economic change. On completion the I-CeM project data will be made available via the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex under existing arrangements for access to nominal, social science data.