The eGranary Digital Library is a product of the WiderNet Project, a non-profit aimed at providing access to information technology and library services in developing countries.

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". Missen developed the idea after studying at the University of Jos in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria, the year before as a Fulbright Scholar. While studying and teaching in Nigeria through the program, Missen experienced first-hand frustrations the lack of Internet access caused. This frustration led to his vision of the WiderNet project with the objective of providing 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. They have also trained almost 5,000 people on topics including policy planning, enterprise management, technician training, and classroom technology.

In 2001 Cliff Missen invented the eGranary Digital Library. There are now eGranary installations in more than 1,600 schools, clinics, and universities in Africa, India, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, and Haiti.

An eGranary Digital Library caches educational resources via a local area network in order to reduce connectivity costs in Internet-scarce areas. Most eGranary subscribers do not have an Internet connection, but those who do can open resources up to 5,000 times faster from the eGranary Digital Library.

The eGranary Digital Library contains an off-line collection of approximately 35 million educational resources from more than 2,500 Web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs and fits on an 8TB hard drive. The collection includes more than 60,000 books in their entirety, hundreds of full-text journals, and dozens of software applications.

Some of the documents in the eGranary Digital Library are in the public domain, some carry a copyleft license, but most of them have been 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.

Any subscriber can include their own digital content in the eGranary Digital Library, making it a publishing platform for communication and collaboration.