Bridging the digital divide

It’s a busy time for the University’s WiderNet Project. Staff and volunteers are preparing to ship 400 refurbished computers to Africa.

Launched in 2000, the WiderNet Project, based in the UI School of Library and Information Science in the Graduate College, brings technology to developing countries. Since 2001, with help from some 60 volunteers from around campus, the project has donated more than 1,000 computers for use at universities in Africa. But all the computers in the world aren’t worth much if their users can’t afford access to the wealth of information that has been digitized and made available on the Internet.

“It’s hard for us to imagine but people are literally starving for information,” says Cliff Missen, director of the WiderNet Project. 

Missen hopes to change all that with WiderNet’s eGranary Digital Library.

Internet in a box: a gift to the world's poorest

Guided by its philosophy that "access to knowledge makes a world of difference," the project has invented a new way to deliver the world’s knowledge to the poorest people on the planet, Missen says. Already installed in 150 institutions in India, Bangladesh, and Haiti, the eGranary Digital Library, also known as “Internet-in-a-Box,” puts educational resources at the fingertips of those without an Internet connection.

	Seven out of eight people in the world don't have access to the wealth of human knowledge available on the Internet, according to Cliff Missen, director of the University's WiderNet Project. He and his staff are addressing that shortfall through donations of refurbished computers abroad—and with a WiderNet invention called the eGranary Digital Library. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

The library is a high-capacity hard drive—about the size of a paperback book—containing hundreds of web sites and compact discs. With specialized built-in software written by UI students, it looks and acts just like the Internet, complete with its own search engine. It comes stuffed with five million documents, including entire books, encyclopedias, and even video and audio clips.

“We copy educational information from the Internet—with the publisher’s permission—and then distribute these resources to schools, clinics, and libraries in the developing world, even in remote areas miles away from the nearest Internet connection,” Missen says. “We’re trying to serve the information-poor without making them poorer.”

Some African universities are spending the equivalent of 24 full-time professors’ salaries every year for a miserably slow connection to the Internet, Missen says.

“We hear this called the digital divide or the information divide, but it’s really an economic divide,” Missen says.

But for $500, schools can have an eGranary Digital Library that gives their students instantaneous access to millions of high-quality resources. Purchasers sign an agreement to keep the library available free-of-charge to anyone who has a computer and can connect to their local area network.  

Books, videos, and more: free, lightning-fast access

Missen first noticed the unfulfilled technological need seven years ago while teaching as a Fullbright Scholar in Nigeria’s University of Jos where there was no Internet access. His subject: computers and networking. Desperate for teaching materials from the web, he called home to Iowa and asked a graduate assistant to send him some web pages via CD-ROM.

“When we loaded the CD on the campus server and opened our first Internet page instantly, the swift response was mind-boggling for my students,” Missen says.

Students in many poor parts of Africa might wait 10 minutes or longer just to log in to their e-mail account. But when they open web pages stored in their university’s copy of the eGranary Digital Library, they have free, lightning-fast access to books, videos, audio, journals, and sites—all of this over their school’s local area network without using one whit of Internet bandwidth. 

“For those without an Internet connection, this library is a phenomenon,” says Stephen Akintunde, deputy university librarian at the University of Jos in Nigeria. “Web pages open 5,000 times faster from the eGranary, and we save tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs every year.”

It’s even possible for eGranary users to update their libraries without an Internet connection. Computers at the WiderNet Project headquarters, housed in the old Daily Iowan offices on the second floor of the Communications Center, scan the Internet sites mirrored in the eGranary for changes. WiderNet staff package the changes for their subscribers, who can procure the updates through whatever means they find most convenient: the Internet, CD-ROM, DVD, flash memory, or even digital radio broadcast. 

“The whole system is completely asynchronous,” Missen says. “A physician can be in the field with her eGranary for months at a time, but when she returns to town and hooks up her drive, she can update her entire library in a matter of hours.”

The eGranary Digital Library is one component of the WiderNet Project. The project also trains computer technicians, provides cutting-edge research on information technology issues, and secures donations of new computer hardware and software—totaling $1 million to date.

What's next: more advances to close the gap

Missen says there’s always more to do to further bridge the digital divide and reduce information poverty.

Missen and his staff are working on adding an e-mail system to the eGranary server, and with help from a $225,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, are expanding the eGranary Digital Library to ten million documents and installing it in hundreds of schools, clinics, and libraries—not only abroad but also close to home, in Iowa and around the country.

WiderNet Project staff recently developed a 12-volt eGranary server that can run for days from a car battery and charge itself from a single solar panel. Inspired by situations in rural Africa where electricity is intermittent, as well as requests from those working in tsunami-affected regions of India, the 12-volt eGranary server uses a computer designed for police cars and other transport vehicles.

And the eGranary Digital Library even went to prison recently when it was installed in a test location in the Iowa Medical and Classification Center on the University’s Oakdale Campus. Internet connections are prohibited in prison, but the eGranary library provides inmates resources for learning life skills, accessing legal texts, and preparing to reenter the workforce.

The WiderNet Project is now looking for people and organizations to sponsor libraries and computer labs in the developing world. The project is recruiting more volunteers to help catalog and organize the eGranary library, continues to collect computer donations, and is planning to make another shipment to Africa soon, possilby to Liberia. Recently, the project received a gift of 20 large hard drives from computer technology manufacturer Seagate Technology, which will host the newest eGranary Digital Library.

“We see the organization going on as long as there’s a need for information,” Missen says.

For more about the WiderNet Project, contact Cliff Missen at missenc@widernet.org or (33)5-2200. The project also has web pages at www.widernet.org and www.egranary.org.

                                                               by Gary Kuhlmann

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