The MINPAKU Library is a specialist library located within the National Museum of Ethnology. The holdings include more than 600,000 books primarily in the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnology and other related disciplines, periodicals, micro-materials, CD-ROMs, etc. The library is the largest among the institutions for cultural anthropology and ethnology research in Japan.
The library also has collections by famous researchers, book collections including The Umesao collection donated by Tadao Umesao, the first Director-General of the National Museum of Ethnology, and other library collections such as "Chugoku Hoshi Sosyo" (The Collection of Chinese Local Records).
World-class periodicals have been widely collected and many of them can only be found in the MINPAKU Library in Japan.

The library is an open-stack system, apart from some restricted rare book areas (see Library Layout).
The library books are arranged by area and ethnic group using the Outline of World Cultures (OWC) classification method of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF).
Periodicals are arranged alphabetically according to title.