You sent a note to Ken Taylor of my staff concerning problems observed in some of our CD-ROMs.
While these items seem to be of little significance to most users, we intend to re-issue these CD-ROMs as necessary once we have completed production of the 1990 Census CD-ROMs.
In the meantime, we assist the occasional user who is impacted by these features. We could, for example, produce updated recordable CDs for your server. In summary, these CD-ROM problems are as follow.
1. A production program error caused a few imputation tables to be overwritten with geographic header information in the STF 3A CD-ROM database files for Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island (CD90-3A-10 and CD90-3A-26).
2. One of our aging CD Publisher machines was discovered to have occasionally dropped a single byte from a file during production. This is the reason for the problem with the Kansas STF 3A CD-ROM database, where a single byte was dropped in one part of a file, causing some data to be shifted by one character in a total of seven block group records.
We have detected similar features in Illinois (CD90-3A-18, STF311IL.DBF at record 3885 and STF321IL.DBF at record 5625), Michigan (CD90-3A-28, STF318MI.DBF at record 9275), and Missouri (CD90-3A-33, STF331MO.DBF at record 2517). We are not aware of similar problems with Pennsylvania or Maine, and would appreciate more details.
3. We are not aware of any problems with the STF3A CD-ROM for Delaware (CD90-3A-11). EXTRACT is a program developed for use with the Census Bureau's Economic CD-ROMs and its use with 1990 Census CD-ROMs is supported informally by Paul Zeisset. You may contact him at 301-457-1151.
4. The internal file names on the Delaware portion of the 1992 TIGER/Line CD-ROM (CD92-TGR-02) are incompatible with some UNIX applications. These have eight-character file name extensions, but only the first three characters are significant (MS-DOS applications ignore the last five characters). We have a special version on recordable CD for those who require it.