The library was founded in November 1949 at the then Technical University of Ljubljana as a public university library for the field of engineering. From 1949 to 1994, the library was housed in an old villa at 7 Tomšičeva Street, and in 1994 it moved to its current premises at 3 Republic Square.
Its core mission was to support education and research in technical and science colleges, and its activities also provided indirect support to the economy. In the early years, it devoted all its attention to building up the library stock and arranging it according to modern professional guidelines, maintaining a mutual catalogue of special libraries and publishing a list of periodical publications of foreign technical journals in libraries in Slovenia.
In the 1970s, it began to cooperate more intensively with related organisations abroad and became a member of various international professional associations and bodies, which enabled it to follow the development of the library and information profession in the world more quickly, to innovatively introduce new methods and forms of work in the field of scientific and professional information, and to become successfully involved in international interlibrary loan flows.
It has always kept abreast of technological developments and updated its services as new technologies have been introduced. It was the first library in the then Yugoslavia to introduce modern methods of scientific and professional information, based on the use of new technological equipment.
With the development of the COBISS software service in the late 1990s, the library gradually automated most of its activities and became one of the largest and most influential members of the unified computer-based library information system in Slovenia.
In the new millennium, she initiated and led the consortium purchase of the most important collections of professional and scientific electronic journals, and played a leading role in the development of the University of Ljubljana's digital library.
CTK has been led by the following directors:
- 1950-1951 Stefan Tausig
- 1951-1953 Mitja Mole
- 1953-1966 Kajetan Kavčič
- 1966-1969 Peter Keršič
- 1970-1982 prof. Mara Šlajpah
- 1983-1990 Nada Čučnik Majcen
- 1991-2009 dr. Matjaž Žaucer
- 2009-2026 mag. Miro Pušnik
For a short time, CTK was also headed by Prof. Slavica Ludvik, Sonja Tovornik and Cveta Kovačič.
