Western Europe, the German-speaking countries, and the United States saw a rapidly rising number of scientific and technical publications since the beginning of the 1850s. In Germany the first technical periodical came into being in 1820. Until 1935 the number of technical reviews grew to a worldwide total of 15.000.

The rise of the scientific and technical literature resulted from the growing importance of science and engineering studies at the universities and engineering schools. Since the end of the 19th century, however, also engineers and scientists of private companies published more intensively.

Yet, at the same time scientific and technical literature became more and more important for companies of the science-based industries like the chemical and the electrotechnical industry. Moreover, mechanical engineering, mining, and steel-production saw an increasing need of literature. At the beginning, each department of such companies was responsible for accessing the required written knowledge. This was no longer possible around the 1890s, when most of the big and also some mid-sized companies began to build up industrial libraries. These libraries had a scientific character and often developed into leaders in the field of subject indexing. For engineers and scientists a fast access to the content of scientific periodicals was both crucial for their daily technical routines and for economic activities like patenting.

The paper examines the role of industrial libraries in the development of industrial research and their importance for the daily work of primarily science-based companies. The paper raises a number of overarching questions such as: Why did companies of the chemical and electrotechnical industries but also of some other industries from 1890 onward built up libraries bigger than the libraries of some big engineering schools? What were the differences in the management of written knowledge between private industry and academia? What was the content of the collections? Who worked in these libraries? How did industrial libraries affect the development of other scientific libraries?