eGranary Digital Library

The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of digital educational resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a process of garnering permissions, copying Web sites, and delivering them to intranet Web servers INSIDE our partner institutions in developing countries, we deliver millions of multimedia documents that can be instantly accessed by patrons over their local area networks at no cost.

What's in the eGranary Digital Library

There are over 10,000,000 documents in the eGranary Digital Library, all of them searchable using our powerful, built-in search engine.

We continue to catalog new items every day, so these numbers are always growing...

The digital library project represents hundreds of hours by volunteer librarians and includes the collective contributions of hundreds of authors and publishers.  These individuals have generously given of their time and resources to create greater learning opportunities for tens of thousands of scholars in Africa.

Many of the developing country universities, schools, clinics and hospitals with whom we work have no Internet connection.  Those that are connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students.  Bandwidth in Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of one-half their operating budget.

Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow -- it can take hours to download a single audio file.

The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber's local area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone within the institution freely and instantly. 

We "store the seeds of knowledge" inside the institution where they can be accessed even when the Internet connection is broken.

In a sense, we say, "If you can't come to the Web, we'll bring the Web to you!"