In March of 1983 two professors from the
Department of Economics of the University of Missouri-Kansas
City decided to take a day trip to Jefferson City. It was
rumored that somewhere deep within the bowels of the Missouri
State Library, there was Census Data in a machine readable
format. On the three hour drive from Kansas City to Jefferson
City, Professors Eugene Wagner and Peter Eaton had time to
speculate about census data usage in a world where personal
computers were widely available. Both had state of the art 16Mhz
screamers with 640K of RAM, a monochrome (amber) 9" monitor, a
5¼" floppy drive and a hard drive with 40 Mb of storage. As you
can probably imagine, those speculations of more than 20 years ago
fell seriously short of the reality of present data usage.
Upon arrival at the
State Library, we were ushered to a small room. While we waited,
we could see 9" reels of magnetic tape on a shelf, with the
initials ‘stf’ and some numbers. This was our introduction to
the summary tape files of the Census Bureau. There was obviously
not much demand for these tapes from the State Library. In fact,
we were amazed that the person in charge of these tapes was
willing to check them out to us. It was on the three hour trip
back from Jefferson City to Kansas City that we decided to try
to set up a center at UMKC. At the time our ideas were vague,
but we knew that we wanted to help democratize data usage
through the use of personal computers.
Unfortunately, our
ideas did not strike the fancy of decision makers at UMKC. It
took us three full fledged projects, 11 years, and four
generations of Intel processors to get a center. In November of
1994, Chancellor Eleanor Brantley Schwartz announced the
establishment of the UMKC Center for Economic Information (CEI).
The CEI is associated with the Department of Economics and the
College of Arts and Sciences of UMKC.
In 1994 the CEI
started its operation with the conducting of three major projects for the
public sector:
We have maintained our
ties to the State Library through participation as a partner
of the Missouri State Census Data Center Program (MSCDC). The
State Library is the lead agency of this program, which works
with the Federal Census Bureau to make census (and other) data
more useful to data consumers. Each state has its own state data
center program, and Missouri’s program is among the most active
and prominent. The CEI became involved in the MSCDC after it had
attained national recognition. The national recognition is due
principally to the work of two core members of MSCDC - the
Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis (OSEDA) of
University (of Missouri) Outreach and Extension and the Urban
Information Center (UIC) of the University of Missouri-St.
Louis. Both institutions have encouraged and supported us. Both
also have been working with the State Library for a number of
years (since 1988) to provide access and value added to users of
census data.
