  Surveys of the Milky Way at various wavelengths have changed our view of star
formation in our Galaxy considerably in recent years. In this paper we give an
overview of the GLOSTAR survey, a new survey covering large parts (145 square
degrees) of the northern Galactic plane using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large
Array (JVLA) in the frequency range 4-8 GHz and the Effelsberg 100-m telescope.
This provides for the first time a radio survey covering all angular scales
down to 1.5 arcsecond, similar to complementary near-IR and mid-IR galactic
plane surveys. We outline the main goals of the survey and give a detailed
description of the observations and the data reduction strategy.
  In our observations we covered the radio continuum in full polarization, as
well as the 6.7 GHz methanol maser line, the 4.8~GHz formaldehyde line, and
seven radio recombination lines. The observations were conducted in the most
compact D configuration of the VLA and in the more extended B configuration.
This yielded spatial resolutions of 18" and 1.5" for the two configurations,
respectively. We also combined the D configuration images with the Effelsberg
100-m data to provide zero spacing information, and we jointly imaged the D-
and B-configuration data for optimal sensitivity of the intermediate spatial
ranges.
  Here we show selected results for the first part of the survey, covering the
range of 28 deg <l<36 deg and |b|< 1 deg, including the full low-resolution
continuum image, examples of high-resolution images of selected sources, and
the first results from the spectral line data.
