EGranary Digital Library
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is eGranary Digital Library. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of Internet resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. 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 served from web servers connected to intranet local area networks (LANs) in the partner institutions.
eGranary was founded in 2001 and is developed by the WiderNet Project, a service program of the University of Iowa. There are now eGranary installations in more than 100 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 thousands of dollars every year. Many 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' requests to "play-through" to the Internet if a connection is available.
As of January 2006, the complete eGranary Digital Library requires a server with a 250 GB hard drive. If a suitable computer is already available at the target institution, the materials can be copied for free. The WiderNet Project also sells preconfigured eGranary hard drives for $350, refurbished servers for $1,000 and complete 12-seat computer labs for $15,000.
Some of the documents in the eGranary Digital Library are in the public domain, some carry a Creative Commons license, but most of them have been freely provided by their authors and publishers as a contribution to global education. About 10% of the content in the eGranary Digital Library is not available on the public Internet; some of it usually requires a subscription or payment, but authors and publishers have agreed to provide it for free.
The WiderNet Project has also developed an entirely new protocol for delivering content updates to subscribers. The system monitors hundreds of Web sites for changes, indexes and categorizes the updated items, and then packages them for delivery to subscribers asynchronously via any kind of transport mechanism. (Internet, intermittent Internet, CD-ROM, flash memory, satellite radio…)
Many subscribers develop their own portals within the eGranary Digital Library to guide their patrons through the wealth of information from their own perspective.
Since any subscriber can also include their own digital content in the eGranary Digital Library, it has become a publishing platform for South-to-South communication and collaboration.
The eGranary Digital Library represents the collective efforts of hundreds 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, and the World Health Organization.
The eGranary Digital Library utilizes volunteers from around the world to assist with computer programming, collecting and categorizing new materials, and building and distributing new libraries. Over 6,000 hours have been logged so far.
