“The eGranary Digital Library holds great promise  for developing economies where the costs of  bandwidth and Internet access are very high.”
	Dr. Stephen Akintunde  Deputy University Librarian, University of Jos, Nigeria

The eGranary Digital Library

A NEW WAY OF DELIVERING THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE

TO SCHOLARS WITHOUT THE INTERNET

Hailed as a new way of delivering the world’s knowledge to the seven out of eight people who cannot access the Internet, the eGranary Digital Library puts millions of documents at the fingertips of those at educational institutions in developing countries without using an Internet connection.  

The few schools in the developing world with connections to the Internet spend enormous amounts of money for slow and unreliable connections.  The eGranary Digital Library overcomes this problem by storing huge amounts of information on hard drives inside a school’s internal network.  It contains books, websites, journals, movies and audio files from hundreds of contributing authors and publishers who freely contribute to help bridge the digital divide.

The eGranary Digital Library is a program of the WiderNet Project, a non-profit organization at the University of Iowa that works to improve digital communications in developing countries.

Currently installed more than 70 educational institutions in Africa, Bangladesh and Haiti, the eGranary Digital Library provides lightning fast access to Internet resources off-line to institutions lacking adequate Internet access.

The WiderNet Project has also developed a plug-and-play server that makes it possible to deliver the eGranary Digital Library to schools without a lot of computer expertise.

The eGranary Digital Library represents the collective efforts of hundreds of authors, publishers, programmers, librarians, instructors and students around the globe.  Plans are to grow the eGranary collection to 10 million documents and get it installed in hundreds of schools, hospitals and universities.

Some of the many authors and publishers who have granted permission to distribute their works via the eGranary include: U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT’s OpenCourseware, UNESCO, Wikipedia, World Bank, the Virtual Hospital and WHO.

“The eGranary Digital Library concept is the solution for creation and distributing

 online content challenges currently facing most African countries.”

Mr. Jacob Mtui, Research and Development, University of Dar Es Salaam

librarian@widernet.org                        http://www.egranary.org