A loan from the Government of Sweden of 17 million Swedish krona, which was repaid by December 1990, provided funding.

The project specifications were for a modern reference work based on a scientific paradigm incorporating gender and environmental issues.

Pre-orders for the work were unprecedented; before the first volume was published in December 1989, 54,000 customers had ordered the encyclopedia.

[2] Associated with the Nationalencyklopedin project are also: In 1997, the first digital form of the encyclopedia was released on six CD-ROMs (later on DVD as well), and in 2000 as an Internet subscription service.

In 2018, after a decision to remove the authors' names from the byline of online articles, SVT reported the encyclopedia may be forced to remove thousands of articles due to copyright infringement unless the authors' names are added back.