EGranary Digital Library - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The eGranary Digital Library provides those who lack adequate Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

access an offline collection of approximately 14 million educational resources from more than 1,200 Web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs. 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

Intranet

An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to securely share any part of an organization's information or network operating system within that organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network...

local area network

Local area network

A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...

s (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

University of Iowa

The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

's School of Library and Information Science. There are now eGranary installations in more than 325 schools, clinics, and universities in Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, Bangladesh

Bangladesh

Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...

, and Haiti

Haiti

Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

. 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

Web cache

A web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag...

and serving

Server (computing)

In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...

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

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

and search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

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

Lucene

Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License....

and Solr

Solr

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document handling...

, an online public access catalog

OPAC

An Online Public Access Catalog is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries...

VuFind

VuFind is an open source library search engine that allows users to search and browse beyond the resources of a traditional OPAC. Developed by Villanova University, version 1.0 was released in July 2010 after two years in beta....

which contains over 60,000 records, and dozens of portals

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

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

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

features in its Community Information Platform. Thanks to a generous grant from the Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

, the Community Information Platform allows users to create and share their own content through technologies like built-in Web editors, LDAP security, Moodle

Moodle

Moodle is a free source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment...

, WordPress

WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...

, MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

, PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...

, 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

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, some carry a copyleft

Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...

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

Asynchronous communication

In telecommunications, asynchronous communication is transmission of data without the use of an external clock signal, where data can be transmitted intermittently rather than in a steady stream. Any timing required to recover data from the communication symbols is encoded within the symbols...

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

Wireless LAN

A wireless local area network links two or more devices using some wireless distribution method , and usually providing a connection through an access point to the wider internet. This gives users the mobility to move around within a local coverage area and still be connected to the network...

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

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, the Centers for Disease Control

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services headquartered in Druid Hills, unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, in Greater Atlanta...

, Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare is a large-scale, web-based publication of...

, UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

, the World Bank

World Bank Group

The World Bank Group is a family of five international organizations that makes leveraged loans, generally to poor countries.The Bank came into formal existence on 27 December 1945 following international ratification of the Bretton Woods agreements, which emerged from the United Nations Monetary...

, the Hesperian Foundation

Hesperian Foundation

Hesperian Health Guides, formerly known as Hesperian Foundation, is a nongovernmental non-profit organization publishing health guides for trained and untrained people to care for themselves and others. The foundation is based in Berkeley, California...

and the World Health Organization

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...

Sources and notes

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

See also

Sources and notes