Conspectus and the Scottish Collections Network: landscaping the Scottish common information environment

The article briefly gives the background to the concept of a common information environment, followed by a history of the development of two major components of a common information environment for Scotland in the form of the Scottish Collections Network, a collections description service, and the Cooperative Information Retrieval Network for Scotland, a distributed union catalogue for meta-searching. The article discusses the application in Scotland of the Conspectus methodol-ogy for the subject mapping of general library collections, and describes how Conspectus data has been integrat-ed in the information environment to allow the identifi cation and selection of collections and associated catalogues with strength in specifi c subjects.