The global legal information network, or glin, is a mission-driven effort of the law library of congress (LLOC) designed to provide timely access to the laws of the world. Glin serves as a critical…

The global legal information network, or glin, is a mission-driven effort of the law library of congress (LLOC) designed to provide timely access to the laws of the world. Glin serves as a critical research and reference tool enabling the staff of the law library to better serve the congress and its other clients. With increasing globalization and the growing complexity of lawmaking around the world, congress S need for foreign, comparative, and international legal information has never been greater or more immediate. LLOC serves as the strategic reserve of the world S legal knowledge and information. As IT moves into an increasingly digital world, LLOC must respond to the rising expectations of its constituents. Glin has been developed as the instrument to harness information technology to carry out the law library S mission to acquire, store and provide access to legal information from around the world. Glin is a reflection of similar needs shared by government organizations around the world for a lawmaking process based upon knowledge of the laws and regulations of other nations. The scope and complexity of this effort dictated that a global network of jurisdictions be engaged to form a cooperative structure to implement glin. An outgrowth of an indexing project undertaken by LLOC in the 1950S, the glin database now contains over 130,000 legal instruments and related legal materials from 45 jurisdictions. Based upon the principles espoused in the brussels convention for the international exchange of official documents, scientific and literary publications (1886), a group of legislatures have agreed to work together to exchange legal materials in electronic format. Currently, 30 jurisdictions contribute legal information directly to the database through the glin network, a federation of government agencies (or their designees), international organizations, and non-governmental organizations committed to a set of standards developed to ensure reliability. Staff members of the law library contribute laws for all spanish- and portuguese-speaking jurisdictions that are not yet participating directly in glin. With over 50 years of experience organizing, processing, storing and providing access to laws from around the world, LLOC is the natural center for the development of glin. Law library staffers continue to be one of the major consumers of the information found in glin. Although the law library has vast experience as a legal information-processing center, IT lacked the technical means to implement its vision for glin. In fiscal year 2003, congress directed the law library to implement a major upgrade to glin and appropriated funds for this purpose. In february 2005, this new system was implemented and, with the addition of subsequent enhancements (release 3.2) this system is operating today (http://WWW.glin.GOV). Glin members enter descriptive metadata in english and one or more of 12 other interface languages (arabic, chinese [traditional], french, german, italian, korean, lithuanian, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish, and ukrainian) and provide digital facsimiles of the full texts of laws and other legal resources (judicial decisions, legislative records, legal literature) in the official language(S) of their jurisdictions in PDF format. Each legal resource is also indexed with terms taken from the glin subject term index (glin thesaurus) which exists in the 13 languages noted above. A technical description of the current glin system is found in section C.2 below. The glin system that was launched in february 2005 provided a more robust and stable platform and incorporated many new features that proved attractive to users. The improvements spurred a major increase in the amount of legal information contributed to the database on a daily basis and facilitated the recruitment of new jurisdictions. This rapid expansion of glin has led to new challenges. The law library is seeking assistance to implement