The FRASER team was busy last year, adding thousands of new items to our digital library of economic and financial history. Here are some of FRASER’s “greatest hits” of 2017:
Federal Reserve Materials
We added a significant amount of content from institutions across the Federal Reserve System. FRASER’s Board of Governors collection now features expanded holdings of nine statistical release titles and thousands of additions to the historical bank call reports. We also added a new timeline covering the development of the 1951 accord between the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System, which was influential in the making of the modern, independent Fed. Our Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia collection now features that Bank’s monthly Business Review, 1918-2015. We also added additional years of the Economic Commentary and Working Papers of the Cleveland Fed. From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta we added the speeches of recently retired Bank president Dennis Lockhart. Our materials from the Chicago Fed were significantly expanded: We added that Fed’s monthly Business Conditions, 1917-1976, and the subsequent periodical, Economic Perspectives, 1977-1995; the 2003 Emerging Payments Occasional Paper Series; the Policy Discussion Papers, 2007-2014; and about 300 additional Working Papers published between 1975 and 1999. From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas we now have Financial Industry Studies, 1988-1998; the monthly Review, 1916-1977; and the massive collection of District Notices, 1914-2006—more than 11,000 guidance letters from the Dallas Fed to its member banks. Finally, FRASER became the home of two St. Louis Fed publications: the historic U.S. Financial Data, 1966-2015, and the regional Burgundy Book, 2008-2016.
Archives
In conjunction with our partners, we also expanded our core archival collections in 2017. From the Missouri History Museum, we added new materials to the papers of William McChesney Martin Jr. From materials in Record Group 82 at the National Archives we expanded the Records of the Reserve Bank Organization Committee and added new series covering Federal Reserve Districts; early discount rates; and historical microdata on branch, group, and chain banking. New on FRASER in 2017 are various records of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, part of the National Archives collection of materials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The FRASER team also assembled a series featuring Papers of Individuals in Federal Reserve History, which brings together personal papers from Fed officials throughout the System’s history.
New and Expanded Collections
FRASER’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle collection now spans 1865-1963; the related publication Bank and Quotation Record is also available for the years 1928-1963. In addition, we also added early state banking reports from Alabama, Arkansas, California, and New York, some predating the Federal Reserve System. In our collection of U.S. federal publications, we expanded our holdings of the historical Bulletins of the Women’s Bureau, added the yearly report of the Joint Economic Committee, and completed the collection of U.S. statistical atlases with the addition of 1880, 1890, 1900, and 2000.
Improvements
In early 2017, FRASER moved to a responsive design, making our collections easier to browse and view on your phone or tablet. Our “What’s New” list, regularly updated with the newest additions to our collection, can now be subscribed to via RSS or viewed on its own page. To help our users find the right content, the details for some authors and subjects now list related subjects and the details for some subjects now list related authors. As part of our commitment to transparency, our “About FRASER” page now provides links to our digitization standards, collection development policy, and documentation for our API.
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