The conceptual and system-technical solutions for creating a digital library, which serves as an effective tool for access to knowledge and scientific and technical information in the field of nature and environment are considered. The main factors that brought to life the concept of creating a global distributed repository of knowledge on the environment and nature management are highlighted, modern approaches to the creation and use of digital libraries are outlined, new opportunities for their users to extract and generate knowledge are indicated. The experience of integrating Russian information resources within the framework of a number of programs and projects implemented with the support of government agencies is described. Based on the system principle, the following phases of information life in this project are singled out: input of information into the system, storage, navigation, search and filtering of editions according to definite features or their combination; output of information from the system. The ways of realization of input, output information and its search are considered. Effective mechanisms of search of the demanded information are given by DBMS MS SQL Server-2000. Advanced SQL-search tools allow you to form mixed queries for attribute search and contextual search.
