Free Access to 38,518,064 eBooks and Texts

Archive.org

The Library of Congress is usually acknowledged as the "largest or most extensive library in the world." Here is a Google Generative AI quote about the Library of Congress with some links to sources. 

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. is the largest library in the world. Basic Planet, Veena World, +6 more It's the national library of the United States and contains materials in over 450 languages. Bustle The Library of Congress has a budget of over $600 million per year and a catalogue of over 160 million items. Veena World, Koha library system cloud hosting & support – KohaSupport It's made up of four buildings, with enough room to accommodate as many as 30 million books. Basic Planet

As of the date of this post, the Internet Archive or Archive.org has 829 billion webpages, 38, 518, 064 million books and texts, 10,532,859 movies, films and videos, 15,505,536 Audio files, 2.6 million TV shows (mostly newscasts), 1,026,649 archived software programs, 4,713,159 images, 244,024 concerts in its live music archive, and 1,829, 180 assorted media files. This collection is entirely free and completely searchable, and it also dwarfs the collections of the Library of Congress.

So why aren't you using the Internet Archive for genealogical research? Think about it. 

Hint: The most efficient way to search the Internet Archive is using Google searches. 

Just for interest's sake, here is a quote from Google's Generative AI about the collections in the Internet Archive.

As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds more than 36 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.5 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251,000 concerts, and over 808 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that offers free access to books, movies, music, and archived web pages. Wikipedia, archive.org

If you compare the numbers I extracted from the website as of the date of this post, you can see how fast some parts of the website are growing. But, you can also question the accuracy of an AI search if you want.