The FRASER team has been busy in 2016, adding thousands of new items to our digital library of economic and financial history. Here are some of FRASER’s “greatest hits” of 2016:
Archives
Earlier this year, our librarians brought the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Financial Crisis Timeline into FRASER. In addition to re-creating the detailed timeline, ingesting its many supporting documents, and adding many more documents, a new theme was created to bring together federal government and Fed documents that illustrate the unfolding of the 2007-09 financial crisis. The theme includes a number of new document collections from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Department of the Treasury, the FDIC, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In partnership with the University of Oklahoma, FRASER has just digitized the papers of Robert L. Owen, who served as a U.S. senator from Oklahoma from 1907-25. The Owen papers contain a wealth of documents related to the creation of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, which Owen cosponsored.
In 2016, FRASER also added the daily business diaries of Charles Hamlin, first Chair of the Board of Governors (a position then known as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board). The diaries were digitized in partnership with the Library of Congress and represent an important addition to FRASER’s collection of Board of Governors archival material.
Federal Reserve Materials
In 2016, FRASER added a number of publications from other Federal Reserve District Banks. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago collection now includes AgLetter from 1979-present, Profitwise News and Views from 2003-present, and economists’ working papers from 1992-present. Working papers and publication issues have been added to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond collection. In the Atlanta Fed collection, we have added statements and speeches of three Bank presidents, one first vice president, and two research directors from the 1980s to the 2000s. In addition to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s research publication Economic Review from 1920-95, FRASER has also added the San Francisco Fed’s Economic Letter from 1973-95 and Federal Reserve Notes, a publication sent to depository institutions in the Twelfth District from 1975-85. Finally, the collection of banking circulars of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is now complete, with more than nine thousand issues dated from 1914-97.
The Board of Governors statistical releases collection now has an additional three titles and more than 3,500 issues, bringing the total number of items in the collection to more than 47,000. The statistical releases are a rich source of historical data on economic and financial conditions throughout the history of the Federal Reserve. FRASER also now has a selection of in-depth memos from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Secretariat to the FOMC meeting materials collection.
Expanded Collections
FRASER’s collection of digitized Bureau of Labor Statistics bulletins, which previously contained issues from 1895 to approximately 1980, has been expanded to include issues through the early 1990s, including the book-length history of “The First Hundred Years of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Missing bulletins have also been added, expanding the collection to more than 4,000 items total.
More than 2,000 issues in 68 volumes of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, a historical business newspaper featuring reporting, maps, data, and statistics, have been added. FRASER’s expansion of this title is planned to continue in 2017.
In addition to the complete run of the FDIC’s annual reports, FRASER now contains issues of the FDIC Quarterly, a regular publication covering the banking industry, for the years 2007-16. FRASER has also digitized a vintage telegraphic cipher code and a manual of instructions for bank examiners, both from the 1930s.
In support of a new Economic Education lesson on the Great Migration, FRASER digitized two additional books from the Department of Labor’s short-lived Division of Negro Economics (1917-25), the 1925 Statistical Atlas of the United States, and renowned African American educator Emmett J. Scott’s 1920 book Negro Migration During the War. FRASER also debuted a new African Americans in the Economy theme highlighting historical resources documenting the impact and changing role of African Americans in the economy and the workforce.
FRASER’s New Improvements
This year also brought new changes to the FRASER interface, including these InsideFRASER news articles, new timelines within the curated themes, and “Previous” and “Next” buttons for easy navigation within a title. Users can now share subject, author, and theme pages more easily via email and social media, and stable URLs for archival folders and items are now available.
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