BLM GLO Records Site Rebuilt

July 15, 2026

As of today, the BLM has launched a fully redesigned GLO Records site at glo-entry-prod.blm.gov, replacing the old ASP.NET glorecords.blm.gov platform that had served the survey community since the early 2000s. The new system is a modern REST API with structured document metadata, PDF-native field notes, and a proper relationship model linking field notes to their parent plats.

GLOFieldNotes.com is already synced. Here's what changed under the hood:

Plat linkage is now automatic. Every field note in our database is matched to its authoritative plat through BLM's document relationship chain. The plat carries the official township ID (PrimaryTwpId), which we validate against the filed township — any mismatch gets flagged before you ever run OCR. This catches a class of record-filing errors that were invisible before.

National corner coverage is live. Corner resolution now pulls from the BLM's PLSS Intersected layer — a national point dataset covering every section corner, quarter corner, and 1/16th corner across all PLSS states. We cross-check every resolved corner between two independent data sources and surface any coordinate conflict directly in the Call Viewer. More corners means more field note pages can be fully geo-located, and fewer runs end up partially plotted.

H3 spatial indexing. Every document in the archive is now tagged with an H3 spatial cell at resolution 7 (roughly 5 km across). That means nearby document lookups are instant — select a township on the map and you'll immediately see all related field notes for adjacent townships, not just the one you searched for.

Document format. The new BLM site delivers field notes as PDFs (not the old .SID multi-page image format). We split them into per-page JPGs on ingest, exactly as before, so the viewer experience is unchanged.

If you have projects from before July 15, they are unaffected — all previously geo-located data, exports, and saved PDFs are still there. New searches and uploads will benefit from the improved corner resolution and plat validation automatically.