The eGranary Digital Library provides those who lack adequate Internet access an offline collection of approximately 14 million educational resources from more than 1,200 Web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs.[1] The collection includes more than 50,000 books in their entirety, hundreds of full-text journals, and dozens of software applications.
Through a process of copying Web sites (with permission) and delivering them to partner institutions in developing countries, this digital library delivers fast access to educational materials including video, audio, books, journals, and Web sites. These materials are delivered from Web servers connected to intranet local area networks (LANs) in the subscriber institutions.
The eGranary was invented in 2001 and is developed by the WiderNet Project, a service program of the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science. There are now eGranary installations in more than 325 schools, clinics, and universities in Africa, India, Bangladesh, and Haiti. The project aims to expand its installations to thousands of schools, hospitals and universities around the globe.
Few schools, clinics, or libraries in the developing world have adequate connections to the Internet; those connections that already exist are rather costly. By caching and serving educational resources via a local area network, the eGranary Digital Library can reduce an organization's Internet costs—potentially helping them to save tens of thousands of dollars every year. Many eGranary subscribers do not have an Internet connection, but even those who already have an Internet connection find they can open resources up to 5,000 times faster from the eGranary Digital Library.
The eGranary Digital Library contains a built-in proxy server and search engine that gives patrons the true look-and-feel of the Internet, at a speed that is otherwise not usually available to them. The proxy server allows users' Web requests to "play-through" to the Internet if a connection is available.
Since many patrons of the eGranary Digital Library are unfamiliar with using the Internet, a significant amount of librarianship—by WiderNet Project staff and volunteers worldwide—makes finding resources easier. The eGranary's interface includes a word search powered by Lucene and Solr, an online public access catalog powered by VuFind which contains over 60,000 records, and dozens of portals cooperatively developed with experts from around the world to help specific groups of users find information faster.
Since 2010, the eGranary Digital Library includes interactive Web 2.0 features in its Community Information Platform. Thanks to a generous grant from the Intel Corporation, the Community Information Platform allows users to create and share their own content through technologies like built-in Web editors, LDAP security, Moodle, WordPress, MySQL, PHP, Drupal, and others. Subscribers can set up unlimited Web sites on their server and use free, built-in software to make Web pages, upload files and share local information with each other.
As of June 2010, the complete eGranary Digital Library contains over 14 million documents and fits on a 2TB hard drive. Some of the documents in the eGranary Digital Library are in the public domain, some carry a copyleft copyright license, but most of them have been freely provided by their authors and publishers as a contribution to global education. About 6% of the content in the eGranary Digital Library is not available on the public Internet; much of it typically requires a subscription or payment, but authors and publishers have agreed to provide it for free to people in low-bandwidth situations.
One of the guiding principles of the eGranary Digital Library is that the content must not be sold for profit. The WiderNet Project pledges this to authors and publishers when seeking their permission and each subscriber institution signs a license agreement stating that they will make the content freely available to their patrons via their local area networks.
To build a reliable, self-sustaining service, the WiderNet Project has developed a business model that aims to cover ongoing program and development costs through grants, donations, sponsored training programs, and volunteers. So far the organization has raised and spent over $900,000 in nine years to develop, field test, and promote the concept. Volunteers from around the world have put in more than 13,000 hours to assist with computer programming, collecting and organizing new resources, creating portals and curriculum, and building and distributing new libraries.
While the development of new features is funded by grants and gifts, eGranary drives are sold to subscribers to recover production costs without making a profit. Subscribers cover the costs of basic librarianship, the purchase, testing, and preparation of the equipment, the transaction costs (like marketing, licensing, and accounting), and providing on-going technical support and software updates. The WiderNet Project sells eGranary hard drives for $1,500. It comes in two form factors: an external USB model for use at a single computer or an internal hard drive that can be added to a subscriber's server. The WiderNet Project also offers the eGranary Digital Library in a refurbished server for $2,400, a new server for $3,200, and a complete 12-seat computer lab with server and on-site training for $26,000.
The WiderNet Project has also developed an entirely new protocol for delivering content updates to subscribers. The system monitors 1,000+ Web sites for changes, indexes and categorizes the updated items, and then packages them for asynchronous delivery to subscribers via any kind of transport mechanism. (Internet, intermittent Internet, CD-ROM, flash memory, satellite radio…)
Any subscriber can include their own digital content in the eGranary Digital Library, making it a publishing platform for South-to-South communication and collaboration.
Since they incur no bandwidth costs, some subscribers share their eGranary via wireless networks to create wireless public libraries, or knowledgespheres, in their communities.
The eGranary Digital Library represents the collective efforts of thousands of authors, publishers, programmers, librarians, instructors and students around the globe. Some of the many authors and publishers who have granted permission to distribute their works via the eGranary Digital Library include: Wikipedia, the Centers for Disease Control, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT OpenCourseWare, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Hesperian Foundation and the World Health Organization.