Polarized parton distributions in the nucleon

The distribution of the spin of the nucleon among its constituents can be parametrized in the form of polarized parton distribution functions for quarks and gluons. Using all available data on the polarized structure function g₁(x, Q²), we determine these distributions at both leading and next-to-leading order in perturbation theory. We suggest three different, equally possible scenarios for the polarized gluon distribution, whose x dependence is found to be only loosely constrained by current experimental data. We examine various possibilities of measuring polarized parton distributions at future experiments.