The ideal aim of the institution is at any time to ensure the optimal exploitation of resources and the development of the cooperative Danish library service across municipal and governmental sectors.
The institution’s primary administrative task is to administrate a number of grants and pools to authors, via the Public Lending Right scheme, special libraries or projects, to be responsible for standards, including cataloguing and classification, and to develop national services like bibliotek.dk, the national webbased search-, request- and ordering facility.
Apart from the administration of Act on library activities, the institution has no formal executive power in relation to the libraries, but runs for the most part its development tasks on the basis of grants given to projects which pursue the development of new services or as temporary strategic grants.
In 1986, the Rigsbibliotekarembedet (Office of the National Librarian), which had been created in 1943 under the Danish Royal Library, became an independent institution.
It in turn changed name in 1997 to the current Biblioteksstyrelse (Danish National Library Authority).