Economic data and publications as snapshots in time

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has initiated the FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) project, and is also adding a new historical component to FRED, called ALFRED. FRASER is an image archive of historic economic data publications which allows for sophisticated retrieval of statistical tables over many years. ALFRED is an automated system that will allow researchers to retrieve historical real-time economic data series. ALFRED is slated to go live in mid-2005. Initially histories will be available for about 25 data series, with more to be added in the future. These two new tools will allow researchers to access economic data as it was presented at a moment in time, and with each correction and update. For many researchers, it important to analyze data as it was available—rather than the perfected data released much later. Important policy decisions are made with this imperfect data—and determining the problems of that data as well as its usefulness is key to developing good models. For the casual user, it can provide information about economic conditions at a specific place and time. A significant feature of the FRED archive retrieval system is the option to enter both a date range (earliest and latest desired material) and a calendar "as-of" date. The presentation will discuss these two tools, their development, and their use. The presentation will also discuss the problems/issues of the naïve user. They may copy tables that have been OCRed, but the OCR has not been verified. We have decided to impose a burden on our users—we require that they register and sign an agreement, stating that they recognize the limitations of the OCR process. In particular, uncorrected OCR tables make it difficult to spot errors. Correcting the OCR is expensive. We plan to evaluate the use of the material, and correct the OCR if the use warrants it.