The Australian Bureau of Statistics website consists of their publications. You can get to it by way of our library website, using the catalogue links to e-resources. To make effective use of it, you need a computer with internet access via the University of Adelaide network, running a web browser e.g. Internet Explorer, and a spreadsheet program. Many ABS spreadsheets are in Lotus .wks format; some, including Basic community Profiles, some are in Excel .xls format. Excel 5.0 or above, or Lotus 1-2-3 97 and above will open both. You may need Winzip to extract ('unzip') some spreadsheets which have been compressed ('zipped') to save download time. Adobe Acrobat is needed for the many .pdf documents. Some files are in the special Supertable format, for which a free client can be downloaded from the Spacetime site; this format has a large and indispensable downloadable manual in .pdf format, and ABS has a help page for it.

In our catalogue, search for the ABS title of the publication you want, limiting to Electronic Resources. This example is finding the website itself...

to get the record

...the link leads to

You can type your search (in this case for ABS publication number '1301.0') thus...

and get...

where you can click on the link 1. 1301.0 2006 - 2006 [Contents] to get ...

If you want to explore,  click here to go to the AbS website.

The library has very few ABS print publications -- not all that they produce, however.  The most vital thing to know when trying to find these documents is the exact title given to the one you want by ABS.

Many people expect that the ABS publication number will be sufficient to identify an item, but this is not always the case.
If you have the ABS publication number for a recent item, for example the Yearbook of Australia, 1301.0, you can begin to look for this number in the catalogue using the phrase search quotation marks in the
Basic Search Keywords option ...

...and then scan the results for the title...

If the number does not appear in the catalogue, and the title is expected to be currently in print, go to theABS Catalogue of publications and products (which is available online in ABS, see below) to find the exact title. The ABS catalogue has a record for each current publication which shows the ABS publication number, the title of the document, and a short description of the contents of the document. What you need is the exact title given the ABS catalogue, which you then try as a title in the library catalogue, if looking for print.

The library catalogue has individual entries for only a minority of the printed ABS publications, not all of them. Be prepared not to find print copies...

...the library has a very large proportion of the whole past output of ABS, most NOT shown by individual catalogue entries, because they are not printed items, but images stored on microfiches or cdrom. For the period 1901-1993, we have all the Canberra office publications on microfiches, and for 1984-1993, the microfiches include all the state office publications as well as the Canberra ones, under the title...

Historical microfiche series  [microform]: statistical publications since Federation

The microfiches are accompanied by printed indexes which need to be used to find a specific publication in the sets of fiche...

Index to the historical microfiche series: statistical publications since Federation, 1901-1993.

From 1994 - 1999, the updates were on cdrom...

Historical publications [electronic resource]

These CD_ROMs contain electronic copies of every printed publication produced by the ABS in a calendar year. Publications are provided in Portable Acrobat Format (PDF) . Most of the Acrobat files on the CD-ROM are text searchable and maintain  the look and feel of the printed publications. The CD-ROMs are available only on a machine in the Non-networked databases area of the BSL, just behind the Information desk on level 3.

Updates since 1999 are available online at the ABS website.

Confidentialised Unit Record Files (CURFs)

The ABS has entered into an agreement with the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee to provide public use of Confidentialised Unit Record Files (CURFs) to participating universities for research and teaching purposes. CURFs contain unidentifiable unit record data from most of the key ABS social and labour household surveys. Access to CURFs is available either on CD-Rom, or through the ABS Remote Access Data Laboratory (RADL) where the CURFs are available via a secure internet-based data query service.

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This page produced by Les Howard