  In the past year, polarized deep inelastic scattering experiments at CERN and
SLAC have obtained structure function measurements off proton, neutron and
deuteron targets at a level of precision never before achieved. The
measurements can be used to test the Bjorken and Ellis-Jaffe sum rules, and
also to obtain information on the parton distributions in polarized nucleons.
We perform a global leading-order QCD fit to the proton deep inelastic data in
order to extract the spin-dependent parton distributions. By using parametric
forms which are consistent with theoretical expectations at large and small
$x$, we find that the quark distributions are now rather well constrained. We
assume that there is no significant intrinsic polarization of the strange quark
sea. The data are then consistent with a modest amount of the proton's spin
carried by the gluon, although the shape of the gluon distribution is not well
constrained, and several qualitatively different shapes are suggested. The
spin-dependent distributions we obtain can be used as input to phenomenological
studies for future polarized hadron-hadron and lepton-hadron colliders.
