FRASER – Discover Economic History
FRASER is a digital library of U.S. economic, financial, and banking history—particularly the history of the Federal Reserve System. Providing economic information and data to the public is an important mission for the St. Louis Fed started by former St. Louis Fed Research Director Homer Jones in 1958. FRASER began as a data preservation and accessibility project of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2004 and now provides access to data and policy documents from the Federal Reserve System and many other institutions. Part of this mission includes seeking out a wide range of historical materials. For a detailed overview of the scope of the FRASER collection, see the Collection Development Policy or this list of highlighted content. In some cases, there are gaps in collections that we strive to fill. Our Needs List identifies the specific documents needed to complete collections already on FRASER, as well as materials we have not yet digitized but would like to. To better inform our users, our staff occasionally add digital material to FRASER from other sources such as the Internet Archive and the American Memory program of the Library of Congress in order to provide further context for materials digitized for FRASER. FRASER can be used in conjunction with other Federal Reserve resources, including FRED, ALFRED, the Federal Reserve History website, and curriculum materials developed by the Fed’s economic education staff. To connect the public to our free economic history materials, our staff also add links to FRASER resources from relevant Wikipedia pages. This will be added to Financial Sources Subject Tracer™. This will be added to Business Intelligence Resources Subject Tracer™. This will be added to Entrepreneurial Resources Subject Tracer™. This will be added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™.