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 methodology for the subject mapping of general library collections, and describes how Conspectus data has been integrated in the information environment to allow the identification and selection of collections and associated catalogues with strength in specific subjects.