Census Data Capture in the 2010 Population and Housing Censuses: The Indonesian Case
Indra Cahyono1, Michael J. Levin2
1Statistic Indonesia, Central Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia; 2Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Cambridge, MA, United States

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and started using computers in the 1960 census. Statistics Indonesia (BPS) first employed scanning for the 2000 Census data using scanning equipment provided by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) with BPS developing the software to capture and process the census data. The capture period was 12 months, the editing took 8 months, and the results were produced in April, 2002, 23 months after the enumeration.

For the 2010 Census, BPS made efforts to improve the data capture operation to get data to the public and private sector users more quickly, so requested bids from several companies. BPS selected Kofax, Inc. to provide data capture processing. Data capture occurred in 33 locations in each of Indonesia's provinces over a period of 5 months after enumeration.

Clearly, in a population the size of Indonesia, keying is not a real possibility if we want to see results in a relatively short period. Also, scanning provides more efficient use of both human resources and data processing facilities. Scanning reduces the numbers of needed the data entry operators and the human errors resulting from fatigue.

We developed a program to transform the captured information into ASCII for CSPro processing. We applied adapted content editing programs from our pilot census to the scanned data. Hence, we were able to obtain a completely edited file for the whole country by November, 2010, and tables before the end of the calendar year. The whole process took 7 months from beginning of enumeration to printer-ready copy. This paper discusses various aspects of our capture procedures, including check in from the field, slicing the forms for scanning, reading the forms, manually checking of the forms, and transfer of the final captured data to the central office for continued processing.

Keywords: Data capture; Indonesia; Population census 2010

Biography: My name is Indra Cahyono, born in Jakarta on August 21, 1975. Status married and has one child (age 3 years).

I completed my education at the University Gunadarma, Jakarta majoring in Computer Science.

Start working at the Statistics Indonesia since 1999. Currently, as Section Head of Database Development of Statistics Social, Directorate of Statistical Information Systems.

Experience has followed the processing of Population Census 2000 and 2010 and also some processing of census and survey conducted by Statistics Indoensia.