The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a cooperative, electronic legal information exchange program headquartered at the Law Library of Congress, is branching out, with new regional centers that will take on some of the work now being done at "GLIN Central" in Washington.
In Kuwait City, Assistant Under Secretary of Justice Nasser Al-Nasrallah meets with Law Librarian and GLIN Director General Rubens Medina during the latter's recent visit to the Kuwaiti GLIN Station to discuss Kuwait's role as a GLIN regional training center.
Aimed at bringing authentic, up-to-date, foreign law material to Congress and the other legislatures of countries that are GLIN partners, the Law Library initiated GLIN as a way to distribute the workload previously borne only by its own staff of lawyers and indexers.
At the yearly GLIN Project Directors Conference held in the Law Library, several country members expressed an interest in taking on even more of the work previously carried out by Law Library personnel, namely, training new staff. Training involves instructing one legal specialist (lawyer or law-trained person) and one computer specialist how to choose and abstract legal instruments for GLIN and how to enter them into the system, using GLIN standards.
Most recently two nations, Kuwait and Ukraine, began moving toward becoming GLIN regional centers. In the case of Kuwait, Law Librarian and GLIN Director General Rubens Medina, GLIN Project Manager Nick Kozura and George Sfeir, the Law Library's senior legal specialist for (and GLIN liaison with) Arabic-speaking jurisdictions, were invited to visit Kuwait City. As the guests of the Ministry of Justice from May 15 to 20, the three GLIN Central staff were there to assess and formulate recommendations regarding the proposal for Kuwait to become a regional center.
To become a regional center, a country first must be able to maintain a "server," that is, it must have sufficient capacity to store and process information. It must also have the personnel and facilities to offer the necessary GLIN training courses. A GLIN center is charged with exercising quality control over the input of countries contributing to its server. Finally, such a center also will ideally identify and recruit the new members it wishes to train.
Mr. Medina met with GLIN Project Director Nasser Al-Nasrallah, who is a lawyer and the assistant under secretary of justice at the Kuwaiti Ministry. They reached an agreement to take the first steps toward establishing Kuwait as the first GLIN training center outside the United States. The GLIN Kuwaiti staff thus will travel to the Law Library in August for training.
The Ukraine GLIN station, which is located in the Verkhovna Rada (parliamentary) Computerized Information Systems Center, welcomed Natalie Gawdiak of the Law Library staff in Kiev. The Kyivan Mohyla Academy, one of Ukraine's oldest scholarly institutions, established in 1631, has now become a partner with the GLIN Ukraine station. The students at the academy, where the primary languages of instruction are English and Ukrainian, work with the GLIN staff by assisting with the English-language abstracts of Ukrainian law. Preliminary discussions focused on the possible future expansion of Ukraine's role in training neighboring countries interested in becoming members of GLIN and on fund-raising strategies.
The new regional centers are helping to make GLIN a true information network.
