Robert Suriano, MLS (Class of 2003)
Electronic Research Information Supervisor
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (since May 2004)

I work in the Research Department here at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. My immediate supervisor is the Bank's librarian. The Research Department is very academic in nature, very similar to that of an economics department at a large university. We have a staff of approximately 25 economists and roughly 20 or so research analysts who work on economic research, writing articles for publication, making presentations, and other similar things.

I have two primary responsibilities. First, I oversee our collection and dissemination (web posting) of economic data and electronic publications. I have a staff of three full-time employees who are tasked with these activities.

My second responsibility is to manage our digital library project, called the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER). The project involves the creation of digital images of historic economic statistical publications, such as Business Conditions Digest, Economic Indicators, Survey of Current Business, and the Economic Report of the President. I currently have four part-time employees who do the scanning, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) work, as well as data entry tasks for the web site. This is an ongoing project in which, to date, we have digitized approximately 150,000 pages (with equally that number to be added to the site during 2006). The project can be found at http://fraser.stlouisfed.org.

In addition to my primary duties, I also coordinate the purchase of data required by the economists we have on staff.

During the two years I've been here, I've also had the opportunity to discuss the FRASER project at a few meetings, including at a conference of the Government Printing Office's Federal Depository Library Program, and most recently at the Missouri Library Association Annual Conference.

If you are a College alumni and want to submit a profile of your current position, please contact Cassandra Jones at cbjones (at) umd.edu.