Digital libraries face similar challenges as enterprise information sources and the Internet: a fast growing amount of digital content requires enhanced ways of supporting information seeking. This paper presents an approach to context-based retrieval in Digital Libraries (DLs). The proposed approach includes creation of a profile representing general information demand of a user (abstract context), and use of ontology matching to identify the documents relevant to the operational context representing the current information demand of the user. A profile represents the user’s interests as a DL reader and after creation is dynamically updated based on the changes in the user’s interests. The identification of documents relevanсе is carried out by matching the user profile ontology against the digital library ontology. Semantic distance calculation is based on the use of a thesaurus.