Digital libraries, recommender systems and information retrieval are some of the most celebrated breakthroughs in the book of internet evolution. Digital libraries are referred to digital resources that are a collection of electronic materials and technical facilities used in searching, creating, and making use of information. They became important sources of information sharing which are extensions and enhancement of information storage and retrieval system used in manipulating data or materials in digital medium. This designed digital storage are used by set or group of users were they will collect and organize the said storages in a way their contents along with their usability supports the information needs of the said of group of users. These digital information resources have revolutionized many aspects of human lives that includes, in especially, the academia. This research is an attempt to show how internet has paved way for a much easier means of information sharing in various communities across the world. The paper is also an attempt to review the idea behind digital libraries and investigate the use of digital resources among African communities and their socioeconomic importance and impact to the continent. The research did also review construction and networking of digital libraries among African institutions, some of which roles are played by e-libraries and information decimation in socioeconomic development, sectorial information needs and the issues involved in the lack of establishment of these digital libraries. Lastly, after the paper reviewed works in progress across Africa, it clearly outlined that in a global neighborhood, large work needs to be done in order for African nations to use information in harnessing their full potentials

In digital libraries and other e-commerce sites, recommender system is the solution that supports the users in information search and decision making. Some of these recommender systems will make predictions by matching the content of an item against the user profile otherwise known as Content-Based recommendation approach. Other recommenders will provide recommendation based on ratings of items from current user and other users and then use it to recommend similar items the current user has not seen, this is known as Collaborative-Based recommender approach. There exist several other approaches that are used in recommending articles and other items to users of different search engines. Over the years several researchers have tried combining these approaches in an attempt to design more efficient recommendations in search engines. This research proposed and designed a prototype of a Hybrid recommender called Zira, which is a model that combines both the Collaborative filtering, Content-based filtering, attribute-based approach to look at contextual information as well as an item-based approach that will solve the issues associated with cold-start problems all working concurrently to complement one another. The proposed system supports multi-criteria ratings, provide more flexible and less intrusive types of recommendations to ensure the improvement in recommendations of e-learning materials to users of digital libraries.