EGranary

Description

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.

• Links

• http://www.widernet.org/digitallibrary/ - main project page
• http://www.widernet.org/digitallibrary/content/WhatsInside.asp - list of the contents (may not necessarily link to the content; just describes what is inside)

• Languages

• English

• Size

• Over 5 million files. They ship in 750GB hard drives.

Formats

• Formats materials are currently in

• eGranary stores and distributes web content in the form of pages and attached files, so any browser-readable filetype may be included in the collection. They are listed here as having web sites, (academic) journals, books, and educational and computer software.

• Scripting (any scripting needed to convert it from current packaging)

Curator Info

Group - eGranary has offered to be their own curators, but we need to ping them about this. There is a lot of curation to be done; someone needs to identify and pull out into a separate website the content that is both (1) appropriate for children and (2) completely open-license.

Group coordinator

Contributing groups and their curators

Allottable size

Assessment

Scope (subjects, ages, other)

• Subjects - A variety of donated materials. The collection is searchable, but there is no subject hierarchy. Math, computers, medical, languages, the environment, religion, chemistry, fiction novels, and pdf readers are among the items included.
• Ages - Geared largely towards older students and adults, perhaps 15 and up.
• Region - eGranary appears to have been designed largely for remote African locations.

Completeness (comprehensiveness for given topic and audience)

• A good, compact collection of generally useful research resources for local hosting at locations without regular internet access. This is not a collection that tries to be comprehensive within a specific domain or body of knowledge.

Multilingualism (specifically es, pt, en, ar)

• Most content is in English. There are some language-learning resources in the collection designed to teach English-speakers another language.

Quality (incl. suitability for audience)

• This would eventually be a good general collection to start a school server out with.

Freeness (license and format)

• There may be interesting issues with this, as some of the content here has been donated by institutions for the specific purpose of putting them on hard drives to ship to the developing world where institutions can locally host them for the benefit of the individuals on their campus only. Some of the content is otherwise commercial or closed-source. Perhaps the developing nations license could be negotiated with the non-open content providers?

Comments, Tags, and Ratings

XO

School library