Fernando Armstrong says not to be alarmed by the man or woman you may see at the bottom of your driveway a few weeks from now, eyeing your home while using a handheld computer.

So long as that person is wearing U.S. Census Bureau identification, it means he or she is part of the vanguard of the 2010 census, collecting preliminary information for the nationwide head count taking place a year from now.

The Census Bureau's recently opened Pittsburgh office is in the process of hiring 1,600 people who will spend April and May verifying and updating previously used address lists for residential properties throughout 19 Western Pennsylvania counties.

The bureau already has all the people it needs for the temporary jobs -- more than 6,000 applied -- from among those who made an initial inquiry using a special phone line for census positions, said Mr. Armstrong, director of the Philadelphia-based census region that includes Pittsburgh.

The recession's timing in knocking people out of work has apparently been a boon for an every-10-year operation that has sometimes experienced difficulty filling positions. Now the Census Bureau is one of the few organizations doing any large-scale hiring, and Mr. Armstrong said, "We are very happy about the caliber of people that are applying."

The Pittsburgh address "listers," as they're known, will earn at least $15.75 an hour while working for six to eight weeks. Early next year, even more "enumerators" will be hired -- at least 130,000 nationally -- to do the follow-up door-knocking at households that fail to return census forms by April 1, 2010.

The address listers this spring should have no reason to knock on anyone's door, Mr. Armstrong said. Aside from adding to or deleting from address lists, based on housing construction or razing, they will be using their handheld GPS devices to record each home's location. The newly computerized system will assist in the congressional and state legislative redistricting process that follows each census.

The biggest change in the 2010 census for households is that none will receive a long-form version of the census, formerly received in one of six homes. Questions about household economics and other factors that were sometimes criticized as an invasion of privacy are now asked on an annual basis of a smaller population sample, through the bureau's American Community Survey.

Mr. Armstrong said the new survey structure has the advantages of providing more timely demographic data, through ACS results released each year, and simplifying the decennial census. About one of three U.S. households failed to respond on their own to the 2000 census, and the detailed nature of the long form was a major factor.

"We're now making the census every 10 years a lot friendlier, a lot easier to complete," Mr. Armstrong said. "It's taking less time of people's busy schedules."

He said the 10-questions forms every household receives next year will focus on how many people live there, their age, gender, race, ethnicity and relationships to one another.

As in the past, that information will be used to reapportion seats in Congress based on population trends, with a chance that Pennsylvania could lose another congressional seat after 2010. It is also the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funding that is allocated according to the population size of different geographic units.