Recently I’ve learned about the library of Alexandria and love the idea of people in ancient times having a central hub of general knowledge that could be used for the betterment of everybody. What surprised me was how they sent people out to the corners of the known world to try and find anything they could get their hands on. Even people who would pass through the city by land or port would have all their books and stuff copied and were given the copied version while the original stayed in the library.
Now I know Wikipedia is a thing obviously, but is there anything else that has a system similar to the library where it’s a vast system of archived knowledge while also actively looking for more knowledge to add, so much so that people who wanted to access books would have to submit their own? I guess Wikipedia might be the closest we can come in today’s world, I just really like the idea of it in ancient times.
Yes, there is - the United States Library of Congress. It's America's oldest federal cultural institution, dating to 1800 under John Adams. Jefferson designated their duties in detail which were centered on providing Congress with a source of information. It started with an allocation to purchase 5000$ in books from England. In 1802 it was totaling nearly 1000 books and 9 maps, and a few were added over the next decade, but then the whole thing was used as kindling to start a fire in the US Capital by British soldiers in 1814. From an earlier post of mine;
After their success in Maryland, the British approached D.C. and entered the city around 8PM 24 Aug 1814. Multiple government structures, including the Capital, were targeted while private property was generally left alone. The Americans had burned York and in response the government buildings were put to the torch, most famously being the White House. The Patent Office was saved by pleas to save the scientific value held within - the Library of Congress, held within the Capital, was not so lucky. The British burned multiple parts of the building but one factor that kept it from complete destruction was the construction materials that were used primarily on the exterior. In numerous rooms furniture was piled and ignited with gunpowder, setting the room ablaze. The Library required no such fuel as the books readily took and burned so hot they jeopardized the exterior stone. That fire spread to the oldest portion, the Senate Chamber, which was extensively damaged due largely to the Library's proximity but also its crosswork of wooden support beams.
What happened next is equally fascinating: Jefferson sold his private library of nearly 6,500 books to Congress for just under 24,000$. It didn't really flourish for a while, slowly growing to 55,000 or so by Christmas Eve of 1851, when it burned again (though not completely, roughly 2/3 being lost). Then along came Lincoln who appointed the right man for the job of leading the library... well, first he gave a kickback appointment to John G. Stephenson, a physician that spent as much time as a Union field surgeon as he did a librarian (if not more) from 1861 to the end of 1864. But Stephenson hired a great librarian, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who was appointed the role by Lincoln after the resignation of Stephenson at the end of 1864. Spofford, a bookseller and journalist previously, served in the role until 1897 and transformed the institution from a library, quite literally, of congress into the American library for We The People that it is today. So what's that mean?
It has every copyrighted publication that happens in the US., and that means adding about 10,000 works every single day.
It has the largest collection of Asian publications outside of Asia, the largest collection of Russian works outside of Russia, and the largest Latin American collection on earth.
It has the largest collection of 15th century publications in the Western Hemisphere and has one of three perfect Gutenberg Bibles known to exist. It has the first publication in what later became America, which dates to 1640.
They have works in 470 different languages and about half the total collection is not in English.
They have the world's largest map collection with about 5.6 million items. They have over 8 million pieces of sheet music, and hold both the world's largest comic book collection and largest newspaper collection.
It is the largest law library in the world.
To your question of searching for knowledge, they have offices in India, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and Pakistan. Those offices work to bring publications from over 60 countries into the LoC collection.
Happy to answer any specific questions you have about the library itself. It is not the only massive repository of human knowledge on earth, just the one I'm most familiar with.
I'll edit to add a comparison - At about 55 million, Wilipedia's articles total about 1/3 of the total number of LoC items (which is currently over 170,000,000 works).