The National Library of Estonia was established in 1918 as the Estonian State Library to provide legislative information to the government of the Republic of Estonia.

Today, its mission is to collect, preserve, and provide access to all publications published in Estonia, in the Estonian language, and about Estonia, irrespective of the place of publication.

It holds about 3.2 million volumes. Along with books, it holds audio recordings, current serials, films and videos, graphic materials, manuscripts, maps, microforms, etc. The collections consist of the archival collection (550,000; Estonian titles published from 1861 up to the present), the rare book collection (27,000; Estonian books published before 1861 and foreign books before 1831), and the main collection (2.4 million; Estonian publications and foreign publications from the humanities and social sciences fields).

ESTER The electronic catalogue ESTER is a shared catalogue that provides an overview of the holdings of the 13 member libraries and makes it possible to use different library services, including acquisition, cataloguing and client services. The National Library’s catalogue contains information about books, serials, maps, sheet music, etc. acquired by the library since 1999. At the same time the National Library has been making considerable effort to add to ESTER information about the holdings acquired before 1999. Until the electronic catalogue contains all the holdings of the Library, readers are also expected to use the older card catalogues.