1. Economic Data as Snapshots in Time Katrina Stierholz Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis IASSIST Conference May 27, 2005

2. FRED, FRASER, & ALFRED FRED—economic time series database FRASER—an image archive ALFRED—real time economic time series database

3. 1Q2004 GDP revisions April 29, 2004 First quarter “advance” GDP is issued (increased 4.2%) May 27, 2004 First quarter “preliminary” GDP is issued (increased 4.4%) June 25, 2004 First quarter “final” GDP is issued (increased 3.9%) July 30, 2004 First quarter GDP is revised to 4.5% (as part of the annual revision) June 2005 the next annual revision will be released, revising the number again… and did I mention benchmarks?

4. Real-Time Data Represents the data at a particular point in time Useful for replication studies, forecast models, evaluating policy decisions (historical), understanding the scope of revisions for various data series First release information available in press releases

5. Finding old revisions Press releases Economic serial publications (e.g., Economic Indicators, Survey of Current Business, and Federal Reserve Bulletin)  They don’t have release dates  But, they do offer a nice “snapshot” view of the economy at a particular moment in time (over the course of a week or month)

7. FRASER Images Part of GPO digitization project Features  Linked tables  OCRd material  SuDoc numbers added  Searchable  High quality scanning  Low-cost way of providing this information OCR cannot be extracted (it is uncorrected)

8. FRASER workflow Publication Scanner TIFF files PDF files http://fraser.stlouisfed.org File cleaning OCR Archive Original TIFF files

9. ALFRED Much more sophisticated (interface and user) Data will go back to December 1996, in the first release (July 2005) 25 major data series have been gathered back to the beginning of their release

10. Database construction Time as a feature (Snodgrass book) Data point  Time interval  Validity interval Only twice as many data points as current FRED database. Will live within FRED, for a while, later it will be a separate site

18. Library/Librarian Issues Loss of information in paper Loss of electronic information Consider snapshots Consider sending it to us

19. http://research.stloui sfed.org Please contact me at: Katrina.L.Stierholz@stls.frb.or g