[acs-r] acs.R version 1.2: Now, with 2012 data

[Ezra Haber Glenn]

Dear acs.R folks:

As some of you have noticed, the new five-year Census ACS data has
just come out (see <http://www.census.gov/developers/data/>), and is
now available via the Census API. To make sure you are able to fetch
the freshest possible data to play with in R, I’ve updated the acs.R
package to version 1.2, which now includes full support for the
2008–2012 ACS data.

The latest version is now available on the CRAN repository -- see
<http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/acs/index.html>. If you’ve
already installed the package in the past, you can easily update with
the update.packages() command; if you’ve never installed it, you can
just as easily install it for the first time, by simply typing
install.packages(“acs”). In either case, be sure to load the library
after installing by typing library(acs), and install (or re-install)
an API key with api.key.install() — see the documentation and the
latest version of the acs user guide for more info.

To get the latest data, just continue to use the acs.fetch() function
as usual, but specify endyear=2012. (By default, endyear is set to
2011 if no year is explicitly passed to acs.fetch, and I didn’t want
to change this for fear of breaking existing user scripts. In the
future, we might to rethink this, so that it selects the most recent
endyear by default. Thoughts?)

(Note: It might take a day or two for the updates to percolate through
the CRAN system.  If you update and you’re not sure which version you
are using, you can always type packageVersion(“acs”) to find out.)
--
Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
Cambridge, MA 02139
eglenn at mit.edu 
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn | http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
617.253.2024 (w)
617.721.7131 (c)