The library's origins trace to 1778, when Dutch scholars in Batavia founded the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences - the first learned society of its kind in Asia. For decades the society promoted scholarship across the Dutch East Indies, accumulating publications and collections that included a growing library. In 1868, the society and its holdings moved to a new building at Merdeka Square, the site that would become Indonesia's National Museum. The collection grew steadily: from 1,115 items in 1846 to over 100,000 by 1920. When the Netherlands attempted to redirect some holdings to the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies back in Europe, members of the Batavia society resisted. The books, they argued, belonged where they had been gathered. They stayed.

World War II tested institutions across Southeast Asia, and many did not survive. The society's library did - for an unexpected reason. Japanese forces occupying Indonesia were impressed by the number of Japanese scholars who had been members of the society and chose not to interfere with the museum or its collections. More remarkably, the occupation authorities upheld the library's legal deposit powers, meaning publishers were still required to submit copies of official publications to its shelves. As a result, the library holds a substantial collection of wartime documents that might otherwise have been lost. After Indonesian independence, the society was renamed the Indonesian Institute of Culture before being dissolved entirely in 1962. The library passed into the museum's care, its future uncertain but its collection intact.

Indonesia's first national development plan in 1961 included a provision for a national library, but nothing came of it. In 1973, Mastini Hardjoprakoso, an employee of the National Museum library, drafted a concept for the institution. The Ministry of Education and Culture was uninterested. It took five more years, a new culture director, and the attention of the National Development Planning Agency before the ministry gave its support. Funding came from an unlikely patron: Madam Tien Suharto, the first lady, who had been struck by a 1968 exhibition of colonial and national newspapers at the museum. In 1980, a ministerial decree consolidated four separate libraries into one national institution - the Library of Political and Social History, the Department of Bibliography and Deposits, the Jakarta regional library, and the museum's own collection. The decree also established Indonesia's national library system, creating libraries at provincial and administrative levels throughout the country.

The new building, completed in 2017, is a vertical archive that rewards exploration. At the entrance, four rooms trace the history of Indonesian reading, from bamboo writing media and lontar palm-leaf manuscripts to European and Chinese paper. Glass cases display the Nagarakretagama, the 14th-century Javanese poem by Empu Prapanca, alongside the Babad Diponegoro, the autobiography of Prince Diponegoro, who led a rebellion against the Dutch in the 1820s. The lobby features a four-story bookcase crowned with an illustrated map of Indonesia. On the seventh floor, a colorful children's room sits alongside a service room for elderly and disabled visitors, stocked with Braille editions and health literature. The eighth floor offers a mini theater, microfilm readers displaying newspapers from the 1800s, and an audiovisual room. The fourteenth floor guards the rare book collection. And from the executive lounge on the twenty-fourth floor, visitors look out over Monas and the sweep of Merdeka Square, the same ground where the Batavian Society first gathered its library two and a half centuries ago.

Perpusnas is more than a reading room. As Indonesia's legal deposit library, it receives a copy of every book published in the country. It administers Indonesia's ISBN program and its Cataloging in Publication system. It maintains bibliographies of Pancasila, the state ideology, and of Javanese manuscripts. Both the United States Library of Congress and the National Library of Australia maintain regional offices in Jakarta, a testament to the collection's international significance. The library runs its own computer cataloging system implementing MARC standards, connecting Indonesian scholarship to global networks. National responsibility for science falls to the Centre for Scientific Documentation and Information, and agriculture to a library formerly part of the Bogor Botanical Gardens, but for the humanities - for literature, history, philosophy, and the deep record of what Indonesia has thought and written - Perpusnas is the keeper.