Compiling and Documenting The CPS on Compact Disc

This project will produce a single CD-ROM containing all of the March Current Population Survey data from 1964¿1993. The project will be combined with software that will permit easy access to the coding, universe information, and questionnaire context of all variables. The foundations for this project are three computer utilities that have already been completed; however, the utilities are for a UNIX mainframe environment. One utility searches through a dictionary of CPS variable names to find all variable names that contain any user-supplied character string. The second utility takes a list of variable names supplied by the user and produces an ASCII file of the CPS data for the appropriate survey years. This utility also issues a report on the screen (or other medium) containing the coding and universe information for each variable in all survey years. The third utility provides context by outputting (to the medium designated by the user) a list of the CPS questions that gave rise to the variables supplied by the user. Proposed Phase I funding will be used to improve and complete existing documentation, to write a user's manual, to modify and improve the existing utilities, and to develop compression/decompression algorithms appropriate for storing the CPS data on CD.