Promotion of national bibliographies should be targeted at publishers and the book trade community, rights management organisations, media and the general public that could benefit from comprehensive and timely information on national published output. Until recently however NBAs have not prioritised the promotion of national bibliographies to the wider community due to the perceived specialised nature of the market. However as mentioned elsewhere the potential users of national bibliographies extend beyond the traditional library environment.

Increasingly, promotion of national bibliographies is achieved via the Web. It is important to provide a clear and direct link to the national bibliography from the NBA's Web home page. Some NBAs are now using techniques such as RSS feeds to promote the national bibliography to the public via the dissemination of newly-published works tailored to their specific interest profiles. Similarly, a "new books" webpage can call attention to recently released publications. It is also important that the national bibliography is harvested by major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, while ensuring that the provenance of the records is clearly indicated.

Since national bibliographies are often publicly funded, there has been a growing call for them to be seen as national data assets to be made freely available under open licensing terms. The promotion of national bibliographies made available under such terms brings its own challenges in terms of resourcing and reaching potential new user groups such as researchers or the developer community who are unfamiliar with library standards.