With its enormous resources and collaborative capacities, the Internet poses a historically unique chance for institutions in developing countries to gain a more equal footing with their sister institutions in more developed countries. Given that more and more academic resources are moving to the Internet – and in some cases being made available only on the Internet – it is imperative that institutions of developing countries become connected soon if they are not to be rendered irrelevant in the modern academic world. 

Yet, many African universities are years, perhaps decades, away from reliable and robust Internet connectivity. Many African universities do not have Internet connections while existing connections are expensive and slow.  In most cases, professors and students pay as much as ten cents per minute to be online and, given their slow connection, find it can take days to search a Web site.  Furthermore, there are many infrastructural impediments to Internet connectivity that are unique to the African context: power failures, equipment failures, regulatory restriction of communication technologies, expensive or unreliable telecommunication technologies, and lack of foreign exchange with which to pay for connectivity.  For many African universities, their first years on the Internet may involve only occasional, unreliable connections with long periods of being off-line while waiting for broken components or broken connections to be repaired.

Our off-line eGranary Digital Library provides Internet resources to people who live in areas lacking adequate on-line access.  Through a process of mirroring (copying) Web sites and delivering them to intranet systems at institutions, we have been able to place our digital library on Web servers INSIDE the institution, where millions of documents -- text, audio, video, animations -- can be instantly accessed over their local area networks. 

Seeing the dramatic impact that this early digital library had on those using the network, the WiderNet Project staff began seeking permissions from more authors and recruited librarians and others to assist in the digital library's development.

By the end of the month, we had already begun to mirror sites and store the copies in on a hard drive. The first version of the Digital Library included English literature, the CIA World Fact Book, medical resources, the WiderNet Project Technician Training Library and the WiderNet Project Satellite Report.  The hard drives, containing over 350,000 items in all, were  then delivered to Africa in February 2002.  Even these limited digital libraries were received eagerly.  University students were thrilled with the speed at which books, articles, and Web sites appeared on the screen.  Without spending a penny, universities gained access to first rate materials.

A second, improved version was delivered three months later in May 2002. It contains close to one million documents, a good portion of which are full-length books and journals.  It also provides information about digital technology and digital collections on the Internet so that, in making decisions about their information technology needs, institutions will know what is possible.  The WiderNet Project Digital Library is now installed at universities in Nigeria, Ghana, The Gambia, and Mozambique. 

In December 2003, a WiderNet Project team visited some of these universities with an updated version of the Digital Library (version 3.0).  The current collection includes several general information resources that include English Literature, full-length books, reference collections and more.  The Library also has several special collections, each of which contains numerous documents.  These specific content areas include Agriculture, Computer Networks, Library Science, Mathematics, and Medicine.  The off-line library also contains information about digitizing materials and making technology decisions, as well as free software downloads and mirrors (copies) of the web pages for our subscriber partners.

Our eGranary team continues to actively pursue existing digital collections, websites, and documents which we can deliver to developing countries via our eGranary Digital Library.  Besides searching for content ourselves, we welcome suggestions for content, as well as donations from organizations or authors who would like to see their material included in this ground-breaking project.  For more information about making suggestions or donating content, please visit Donating Content. 

If you have any questions or comments, please email librarian@widernet.org.