By NATALIE GAWDIAK
Sometimes the programs and plans one undertakes are more than the sum of their parts. The Law Library's recent Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) three-week training seminar was one of these.
Seminar participants in the Law Library Reading Room (from left, standing): Natalie Gawdiak, GLIN Ukraine liaison; Sandra Sawicki, GLIN instructor; Glenn Reitze, GLIN instructor; Janice Hyde, GLIN program officer; Paulo Roberto da Silva Pinto, Brazilian technical specialist; Eduardo Ghuisolfi, Uruguayan technical specialist; Soumaya Jmour, Tunisian technical specialist; Nick Kozura, GLIN project technical manager; Luis de Castro, GLIN technical specialist; Serhiy Pylypenko, Ukrainian legal analyst; Dario Ferreira, GLIN instructor; and Jean Lee, GLIN scanning technician; (seated): Leonat Pashkja, Albanian technical specialist; Sokol Berberi, Albanian analyst; Heloisa Klee, Brazilian legal analyst; Maria Cristina Terra, Uruguayan legal analyst; and Tetyana Kovaleno, Ukrainian technical specialist. Not pictured are: Ameur Bourourou, Tunisian legal analyst; Rubens Medina, GLIN project manager; and Christine Anderson, GLIN administrator.
GLIN is a cooperative, online legal database to expedite the exchange of laws between countries. An outgrowth of the Law Library's indexing and abstracting of law gazettes begun in the 1950s, this network has now gone global and is a parliament-to-parliament program. Each participating nation sends a technical specialist and a law-trained staff person to the Law Library to learn the technical and legal standards necessary to put GLIN into effect in their country. The most recent session took place in the Law Library on Feb. 3-21.
Left, Tunisian technical specialist Soumaya Jmour enjoys a humorous remark while receiving a GLIN training certificate from Law Librarian Rubens Medina at the end of the three-week session; right, Albanian participants Sokol Berberi, legal specialist and Leonat Pashkja, technical specialists, surprised the Law Library staff with a box of Valentine chocolates during a Law Library coffee held by Library staff to welcome the GLIN teams during the February seminar.
Because GLIN is a cooperative enterprise, as both Rubens Medina, GLIN project director, and Nick Kozura, GLIN technical manager, pointed out the start of the seminars, the "training" taking place is more accurately described as an information exchange. This session included representatives from Albania, Brazil, Mexico, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uruguay. The level of information technology in some nations is on a par with that of the United States, except for the lack of sufficient financial resources to obtain hardware and software. Thus, classmates taught each other and asked questions that focused on the most crucial aspects of training. In addition, some member country representatives offered to work on basic features of the GLIN network itself.
Technical specialists in the Law Library's GLIN training classroom (from left, standing): Leonat Pashkja of Albania; Eduardo Ghuisolfi of Uruguay; Paulo Roberto da Silva Pinto of Brazil; (seated): Tetyana Kovalenko of Ukraine; Konstantinos Kalpakis, NASA-GLIN instructor; and Soumaya Jmour of Tunisia. For the first time during the legal training sessions, the GLIN legal analyst participants were asked to draw up a descriptive outline of the hierarchy and nomenclature of their country's legal system. The result of this exercise will benefit users when these descriptions are made available in GLIN to enable correct searching through the various levels of legal instruments and to facilitate comparative legal research. The GLIN legal representatives also had to the opportunity to meet their counterparts on the Law Library research staff. These personal contacts are excellent in-country sources that work to the benefit of both the U.S. Congress and parliaments abroad.
Konstantinos Kalpakis of the University of Maryland spoke on the uses and construction search engines for Web sites. A representative of a software company that developed the portable document format (PDF) also gave the technical participants an overview of the PDF facility, an integral component of GLI
Ms. Gawdiak is a writer-editor in the Law Library.
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to April 7, 1997 - Vol. 56, No. 7