Think Globally

Meg McCaffrey -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2004

It isn't easy for students and educators to find a resource that offers a variety of political viewpoints minus the propaganda. Enter Global Views and Voices, a new Web site that provides a diverse mix of perspectives on current events from writers, scholars, and former heads of state from around the world. Contributors range from well-known Westerners, like former President Jimmy Carter, to writers from Asia and Africa.

The subscription site, suitable for older high school students, is a joint venture of openDemocracy.net, a London-based online magazine of politics and culture, and Alexander Street Press, a Virginia-based academic publisher of humanities databases. The site combines Alexander Street's indexing and organizing expertise with openDemocracy's canvassing of e-zines, Weblogs, and newsgroups for the broadest reactions to current events. Sample contents include a Palestinian author's Weblog on living in Gaza, and accounts from international reporters inside Iraq that are juxtaposed with news accounts from Washington, DC.

The site offers annual subscriptions, with prices scaled to match a library or school's size and budget; for example, for a school with fewer than 800 students, the subscription rate is $350.