Over the past year, FRASER has grown significantly, adding more than 25,000 new items with more than 500,000 pages to the collection.
Federal Reserve Materials
In 2023, FRASER expanded its Federal Reserve materials collection to a higher degree than ever before. Through partnerships with colleagues in archives, public affairs, research, and community development across the Fed, FRASER added or made significant additions to more than 50 Federal Reserve System publications.
These expanded collections include more than a dozen new titles from the Atlanta Fed spanning the past 30 years, including working papers, blogs, and a series of podcasts. Our San Francisco Fed collection expanded with decades of working papers and major research publications, including Economic Review, FedViews, Western Economic Developments, and others. The Kansas City Fed collection now includes Community Reinvestment (1993-2002) and Economic Review (1916-1977). FRASER added decades of media advisories and press releases, speeches, and research publications from the New York Fed. The team also added a collection of oral histories from the Board of Governors that were created in conjunction with the 2013 Fed centennial.
In addition, the FRASER team worked with the Chicago Fed archives to add hundreds of early bulletins and circulars (1914-1967) from that Bank to Sixth District member banks, which provide historical snapshots of the day-to-day operations of the pre-internet financial industry. Many of these letters date from WWI and WWII and include instructions from the Chicago Fed on topics as wide ranging as working with the Boy Scouts to sell Liberty Loan subscriptions, the “new small-size currency” introduced in 1929, and prohibitions on the circulation of gold. Circulars and bulletins also often provide a glimpse into major historical events that disrupted business as usual. Notable examples in this collection include changes in international currency with the end of World War II, emergency preparations surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, and bank closures stemming from the 1967 Detroit riots.
Federal Reserve History
FRASER’s mission to preserve access to data and policy documents has led to new collections cited by our partner site Federal Reserve History. In late 2022, economist Jonathan Rose became the new Federal Reserve Historian. As part of his work to preserve and expand access to the Fed’s history, Rose has worked with the FRASER team to identify materials that provide key primary sources supporting many new historical essays. FRASER librarians have worked to find and digitize materials and have curated new collections to align with the new essays. Two of these new themes—Payments and Community Development—bring together existing content with newly added materials to help illustrate key functions of the Fed.
Archives and Historical Publications
In 2023, FRASER added the diaries and press conferences of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945. During his brief tenure as Farm Credit Administrator and throughout his time at the Treasury, Morgenthau compiled more than 860 diary volumes, including daily records of his official activities.
FRASER has also digitized and added the Publications of the Children’s Bureau, 1913-1949. Created in 1912 as part of the Department of Labor, the Bureau produced hundreds of publications covering child labor, infant and maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, and related topics.
Other new and expanded collections include additional publications from the FDIC, such as thousands of its press releases, 1984-2018. The press releases cover the supervision and regulation operations of the agency, including actions taken in response to the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s. As part of its work to better represent the broader history of the financial industry, FRASER also added further commercial banking trade publications with issues dating from the 1920s to the 2010s.
FRASER Updates
What’s next for FRASER?
- FRASER’s 20th birthday in July (see our history of the site from the 15th anniversary commemoration)
- New and exciting site features, including improvements to the document viewer
- And, of course, new content added every month!
Stay tuned for more FRASER updates via our newsletter or keep up with the latest additions via our What’s New page (and its RSS feed, if you prefer). Have a research question? Email our reference desk.
© 2024, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
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