Resource Review: FRASER

by guest author Dan Brackmann

Sent in an email to all current law faculty on December 13, 2019.


This holiday issue is about the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research or “FRASER.” FRASER is a free public database from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRASER holds a digital library of U.S. economic, financial, and banking history—particularly the history of the Federal Reserve System.

FRASER - Explore Access Learn

FRASER collects raw economic data from the Federal Reserve plus aggregated material from other outside sources. It includes job and salary data, economic reports, monetary policy documents, manufacturing statistics, historical sources, and personal papers. FRASER can be searched in a number of ways, such as for data, for federal reserve material, or for archival material.

map of 1914 Federal Reserve Districts
1914 map of the Federal Reserve Districts

FRASER also has an active blog and Twitter feed to highlight new and interesting material from the database, such as an economic report on Christmas spending from 1953, the records of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, an institution founded in 1865 to provide deposit banking services to African-Americans freed with the Thirteenth Amendment, and a 1914 map of the Federal Reserve Districts.

FRASER offers a tutorial for new users here: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/howto/