README.md

In andrewraim/sfreader: An R Package to Read Census Summary Files

Overview

Releases of tabulations from the decennial census or American Community Survey (ACS) are organized into Summary Files. Data from Summary Files can be obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau FTP site. These data contain many tabulations of interest and may be especially useful in secure computing environments which do not have access to the internet; e.g., where Census Bureau data API cannot be accessed. However, data obtained from the FTP site are distributed in a format which is somewhat difficult to navigate. The format may vary across different Summary Files.

The purpose of the sfreader package is to help users extract information from the files within a Summary File. Once the information is extracted, users will be able to refer to Summary File documentation to interpret the data and use data manipulation tools (such as the Tidyverse) to query or produce customized datasets for applications. As of this writing, only 2010 SF2 is supported.

The authors - not the U.S. Census Bureau - are responsible for this project and any views expressed herein. Comments or questions should be directed to the authors.

Installation

To install from Github, obtain the devtools package and run the following in R.

devtools::install_github("andrewraim/sfreader")

andrewraim/sfreader documentation built on May 21, 2022, 3:39 p.m.