About Us

Mission

The Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER®) is a data preservation and accessibility project of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRASER’s mission is to safeguard and provide easy access to the nation’s economic history—particularly the history of the Federal Reserve System—through digitization of documents related to the U.S. financial system.

Furnishing economic information and data to the public has historically been an important mission for the St. Louis Fed. We continue that proud tradition, started by former St. Louis Fed Research Director Homer Jones in 1958, by offering digital access to historic policy documents and data to scholars, economists, analysts, students, and interested observers of the U.S. economy.

Scope

FRASER preserves and provides access to economic and banking data and policy documents. To this end, various types of documents have been digitized, including the following:

  • Publications of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
  • Publications of District Federal Reserve Banks
  • Statements and speeches of Fed policymakers
  • Archival materials of Fed policymakers
  • Government data publications
  • Statistical releases
  • Congressional hearings
  • Books
  • Reports by various organizations

How to Use FRASER

The blue navigation bar at the top of each page guides users through the wealth of FRASER materials.

  • Data & Statistics—Various publications that are primarily statistical in nature, including books, periodicals, and statistical releases.
  • Federal Reserve History—Documents relating specifically to the Federal Reserve System.
  • Special Collections—Archival collections of documents related to the Federal Reserve System.
  • Topics—Browse documents grouped by a subject or common theme.
  • Timeline—Browse documents by date according to five-year increments.
  • Authors—Browse documents by author.

A handy search bar is available at the top of each FRASER page.

The search feature allows searches of the full text and librarian created metadata (title, author, description, etc.) of all documents on FRASER. An Advanced Search option is also available. If you need assistance, just click on the “Ask a Librarian” tab to submit a question and someone will respond via email.

Technical Information

Each publication digitized for FRASER has been scanned using a flatbed, planetary, or automatic document feed scanner into a high-resolution, 300- to 600-dpi tag(ged) image file (TIFF). Unprinted marks are removed and documents are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software to introduce text and convert the file to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The OCR is generally accurate but uncorrected. Any data or text copied directly from a PDF should be checked for inaccuracies.

Some publications have been downloaded from their original institutions or secondary sources, including the websites of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Government Printing Office (GPO).

Many FRASER publications have had significant tables and articles extracted; these can be viewed individually or, in the case of a serial publication with recurring tables, across a span of issues.

Collaboration

We gratefully acknowledge the generous assistance from the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries, the GPO, and the following libraries:

Brookings Institute
Creighton University
Denison University
Everett Public Library
Federal Reserve System libraries
Indiana University, Bloomington, Wells Library
Kansas City Public Library
Library of Michigan, Michigan Department of Education
Long Island University
Missouri Historical Society
Missouri State University
Norwich University
Saint Louis University
Saint Louis University School of Law
St. Louis Public Library
University of Missouri—Columbia
University of Missouri—Kansas City
University of Missouri—St. Louis
University of Utah
Washington University in St. Louis

Please contact us if you would like to discuss collaborating on an appropriate digitization project or have documents you would like to contribute to our collection. Thank you for visiting FRASER.