Prior to achieving statehood on November 11 , 1889 , the Territorial Library reported a collection of 10,448 volumes . The new state legislature passed a bill creating the state library on March 27 , 1890 . The state library 's collection was organized under the Dewey Decimal Classification system in 1898 , and a card index was created in 1901 . 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 . At its greatest extent in the 1990s , the library contained 547,000 books , periodicals , and documents
2001 Nisqually earthquake
2001 Nisqually earthquake
Washington State Library