The one thing that has dissapointed me most about ASME is the difficulty the create in accessing these older papers. I have been able to get some of the Markl papers myself as I was able to, by luck, run across a pre-Ed Klein publication of ASME collected papers. I'll have to see if ASME really is reprinting some of these papers. With it's history, they'll probably be charging and arm and a leg for them.

Quite frankly, I wish ASME were more like ASCE. I had an occasion to go looking for and ASCE paper from the early 80's. One of the structrual engineers is an ASCE member. He was able to go to their website, find the paper as a PDF file, and download it w/o some extra exorbitant fee. His annual membership was good enough to get him this information.

I think ASME would much better serve its membership (and I'd actually consider joining, myself) if they'd hire a couple of interns to scan and index these old papers and make them available for download from the website.

As it stands now, I've seen ASME as little more than a cash machine and I could never see a reason for a working engineer to be a member. Businesses certainly benefit from membership to keep up with the codes, but there's just no value for the typical engineer.