The Australian Bureau of Statistics is ramping up preparations for the August 2011 national census, announcing a request for tender for two new high speed scanners.

ABS scans ahead for Census 2011

August 28, 2009:The Australian Bureau of Statistics is ramping up preparations for the August 2011 national census, announcing a request for tender for two new high speed scanners.

The ABS acquired 12 Inotec Scamax 510 document scanners for the 2006 Census which managed to scan a total of 65.5 million pages over 71 working days.

Online Census submissions comprised only 9% of 2006 Census Returns, and the ABS is predicting this will rise to around 30% in 2011.

However this will still leave an estimated scanning workload for the 2011 Census of eighty million (80,000,000) double-sided sheets, to be scanned in an estimated 100 working days.

The ABS will be conducting a full "Dress Rehearsal" for the 2011 Census next year at a site in the Melbourne CBD where 20,000 test forms will be scanned and processed over several passes

The eCensus facility was developed, hosted and operated by IBM Australia. The application is based on the Websphere application platform and hosted in an IBM data centre on dedicated P-Series servers.

The two new scanners will require the the ability to "scan coloured maps and have these images stored for future use in the processing environment. There will be approximately 32,000 of these maps," according to the RFT.

The ABS will continue to use IBM's Intelligent Forms Processing (IFP) software supplied to capture the images and data for the 2006 census .

Around 700 workstations at the ABS run a standard desktop environment of Windows XP SP3, Lotus Notes 8.5, Lotus Symphony and/or Open Office. Windows Server 2008 provides file, print and naming services, along with Oracle 11g as the preferred database service. The ABS uses TCP/IP over 10/100 Mbps switched ethernet LANs and Frame Relay WAN.

The ABS has also been undertaking trials of ePen technology using specialised paper and a pen which contains imaging technology along with standard pen and paper (ink) functionality. Data is still recorded in the paper record book, but as it is also imaged, it can be uploaded to the ABS near to the time of it's capture.