[3][4] The first shipment of books departed from New York City on May 21, 1853, aboard the Invincible, which traveled around Cape Horn and South America to San Francisco.

[10] The state library's collection was organized under the Dewey Decimal Classification system in 1898, and a card index was created in 1901.

[11] The library occupied the Joel M. Pritchard Building on the State Capitol campus in Olympia from 1958 until it was damaged by the 2001 Nisqually earthquake and evacuated.

[15][20] The library has since expanded its digital collections, which include scanned copies of older state newspapers and books.

[15] In 2019, the state legislature approved a $2 fee on recorded documents to fund the construction of a new library and archives building in Tumwater.