The North Atlantic Population Project: Progress and Prospects

The North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) is a massive database of historical census microdata from European and North American countries. The backbone of the project is the unique collection of completely digitized censuses providing information on the entire enumerated populations of each country. In addition, for some countries, the NAPP includes sample data from surrounding census years. In this article, the authors provide a brief history of the project, describe their progress to data and plans for the future, and discuss some potential implications of this unique data resource for social and economic research.