Cornell University has announced that its Albert R. Mann Library and the South African-based Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa have received a three-year, $4.9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to enhance access to agricultural research literature in developing countries.

The grant will enable Cornell and ITOCA to extend the reach in Africa and Asia of the Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL), which was founded in the early 1990s to provide a searchable, offline, digital library to public and nonprofit institutions in income-eligible countries. With funding from Gates, Cornell and ITOCA hope to provide three hundred institutions with copies of the latest iteration of TEEAL as well as training for more than twenty-two thousand students, faculty, researchers, staff, and government officials.

The TEEAL system includes more than one million articles in some two hundred and fifty highly ranked journals, delivered on a single hard drive. Mann Library staff will redesign the system to include more material, including previously unpublished information collected by the Gates Foundation during its years of work in the developing world, as well as valuable local scientific literature not currently disseminated. In addition, the foundation will make its reports and documents available for free online as part of a new online digital library.

In January, Mann Library and ITOCA will begin working with universities, agricultural ministries, and organizations in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, and Burkina Faso, as well as Bangladesh to provide enhanced access to the system.

"With this grant and the training it will support, many researchers stationed in academic and research institutions where Internet connectivity is still a challenge will have an opportunity to participate in up-to-date global research and address local challenges," said ITOCA executive director Gracian Chimwaza.