TRAIL welcomed five new members in 2017: the Colorado School of Mines, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, UCLA, and the University of Wyoming. Membership in TRAIL now numbers 47 institutions. The number of TRAIL individual members has grown as well, to 15. (Individual members are from non-member institutions and donate their time and service to TRAIL projects). TRAIL depends upon member institutions and CRL for ongoing financial support to continue to do the work of identifying, acquiring, cataloging, digitizing, and providing unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports. More information on membership in TRAIL can be found here.

TRAIL was formed in 2006 to meet the challenges of access to technical report literature and has since deposited over 66,000 digitized technical reports into the HathiTrust and the University of North Texas (UNT) Digital Library. TRAIL content in the HathiTrust and UNT repositories is openly accessible to all through the TRAIL search interface.