eGranary Digital Library

In 2000 Cliff Missen and Michael McNulty founded WiderNet to "provide training and research in low-cost, high impact uses of information technologies in developing countries".

The WiderNet Project has shipped over 1,600 computers, 50,000 books, and more than 800 eGranary Digital Libraries to schools, clinics, and universities in Africa, India, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea since 2000.

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.

The eGranary's interface includes a word search that Lucene and Solr power; an online public access catalog that VuFind funds, which contains over 60,000 records; and dozens of portals experts from around the world cooperatively develop.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Intel Corporation in 2010, the Community Information Platform was developed to allow users to create and share their own content through technologies like built-in Web editors, LDAP security, Moodle, WordPress, MySQL, PHP, Drupal, and others.

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.

While grants and gifts fund the development of new features, subscribers buy eGranary drives at a highly subsidized rate, just enough to recover production costs without making a profit.

Their research includes an overview of how the eGranary can provide web pages and multimedia files to under-resourced areas and counter the challenges of low bandwidth, as well as be an experiment to create metadata through crowd cataloging.