2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Trade literature, including trade journals, magazines, catalogs, cards, manuals, brochures and more, provides avenues for professionals in an array of industries to share knowledge, news, regulations, trends, data, new products, and other information key to keeping up to date in their particular industry. This content is important for engineering scholars and practitioners alike, enabling them to do everything from price specific materials, learn about new devices, understand industry trends, read about new regulations and more.

Access to trade literature has changed in recent years. Publishers may have ceased print runs entirely, they may make electronic access impossible for libraries with no institutional access options, or they may make electronic access too expensive for library subscriptions. Trade literature is precarious broadly, as publishers also may not have archival back-ups for electronic-only content. At the same time, given the expense and local space constraints, libraries may have stopped subscribing to print content and even removed print back issues from their holdings. This leaves libraries in a difficult situation: a landscape where they cannot provide access to a growing number of these trade literature titles.

In this paper, we define trade literature, share a brief history of trade literature, and discuss its importance to engineering research and scholarship. We examine several trade publication titles to determine library access to print and electronic content of these titles to make a case that the content is at risk of being inaccessible via libraries in the future. With this paper, we hope to inspire publishers so this information can be available in the future.