Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor

Sometimes, poking around Federal Reserve Bank websites turns up some interesting and useful things. Like this week’s resource, “an economics information portal” for librarians and students,” via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Economics–United States–Portal
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Liber8
Here is a website by librarians for librarians. “Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis librarians designed this site with university and government document librarians, students, and the general public in mind. Economic information can, at times, be difficult for the non-economist to find and understand. We hope this site will provide a single point of access to the economic information that the Federal Reserve System, other government agencies, and data providers have to offer. We specifically selected non-technical sources that would be simpler to use and easier to understand.”

The clean, deceptively simple design of this site belies the wealth of content you can find here. Some items are local; other links will take you to information on external websites. On the home page, you’ll see three major geographic sub-headings — International, National and Regional. Under each heading, you’ll see a couple of current reports (PDFs), with a “more” link to get to additional documents. In the middle of the page are links to the latest economic statistics, again under the three geographic headings, with “more” links to additional data. Scroll further down and find a collection of “useful links” — to international, national and regional information, with “more” links to…more links.

There is a true jewel nestled within this website — the International Economic Statistics (IES) Database: “The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Research Library’s IES Database simplifies the search for world-wide economic indicators. Individual indicators (such as GDP and CPI) are linked, and each link has a description of the data. Included in each record is the title, corporate author, publisher, years covered in the data series, type of publication (text, table, chart), frequency with which the data is published, country of origin, a URL, available languages, subject headings, format (.pdf, .xls, etc.), a summary (where available), and any notes needed to clarify the data. The database is title, country, subject and keyword searchable. The links will be checked regularly to maintain accuracy. Indicators are continually being added.” The search form allows you to input keywords and/or choose countries, corporate authors and specific subjects using dropdown menus.

Other “don’t miss” links:
+ AmosWEB GLOSS*arama: “…a searchable database of 2000 economic terms and concepts.”
+ The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s Center for Latin American Economics: “…focuses its research efforts on issues of particular concern in Latin America–not only in the core central bank areas of monetary, macroeconomic, foreign exchange, banking, and fiscal issues but also across a spectrum of applied and theoretical concerns.” Many publications are available here, and the entire site is available en espa�ol.
+ Inflation Central, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland: “Track inflation in the United States and across the world and put it all in perspective with our analysis and commentary.”
+ FRASER, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research: “On this web site you will find links to scanned images (in Adobe� Acrobat� PDF format) of historical economic statistical publications, releases, and documents.”
+ FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data): “a database of over 3000 U.S. economic time series. With FRED you can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series.”
+ A page on the Bank for International Settlements (who knew?) website that provides links to central bank websites in countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.
+ An integrated multilingual dictionary of trade terms from the Foreign Trade Information System of the Organization of American States.
+ Fed in Print, from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: “…a comprehensive index to Federal Reserve economic research.”

Oh, in case you’re wondering how this site got its name: Liber8 is provided by the Research “Lib”rary of the “8″th Federal Reserve District. Bravo!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.