Liber8 Library Advisory Board

I'm a Board Member on the Liber8 Library Advisory Board for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. I've never been on a Board. Apparently it means I get lunch, great professional discussion, and schwag. The Federal Reserve Bank has cool schwag--a baggie of shredded money!

Don't know much about the Fed? This is my third visit since starting library school, so I'm finally figuring it out. Here's an easy explanation. The Fed shows up in the news when the Board of Governors sets the discount rate (not quite so simple an explanation) and twice a year when the Chairman of the Board of Governors (currently Ben Bernanke, formerly Alan Greenspan) speaks before Congress as required by law.

Each of the 12 branches of the Federal Reserve Bank has a specialty--San Francisco specializes in the Pacific Rim, Dallas has immigration, etc. The St. Louis Fed specializes in data. Since the Fed is a quasi-federal agency, that data is freely available. The data is compiled by economists for economists, not particularly accessible to the rest of us.

This is where Liber8 comes in--a website designed to be a portal for librarians and other non-economists interested in economic data. Before Liber8, I might have started at the overwhelming Bureau of Labor Statistics website or the confusing FedStats website. Liber8 will lead me to those sites as necessary, but through a directory structure that makes more sense to me as a librarian.

The reason the Liber8 Library Advisory Board met this week was to discuss a new effort by the librarians responsible for Liber8--an e-newsletter. We saw a couple of drafts and it looks really exciting. Each month's issue (9 times a year--roughly when schools are in session) will have a theme and include a brief (2 or 3 paragraphs) explanatory article signed by the economics researcher who wrote it, links to recent articles about that theme that are selected to be accessible to the non-economist, and links to free sources of data on that theme.

We saw these newsletter drafts in print form and they fit on two pages. The plan, however, is for them to be distributed electronically. You can guess my significant contribution to the discussions: RSS feed. Watch for it in August!

June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007