A new way of thinking and working

At a UKSG 2013 conference breakout session , co - presented with Kristin Antelman, I offered observations on organisational readiness for web - scale discovery services adoption. Since then, I’ve had time to reflect on responses from audience members and conference attendees. So this invitation to contribute an editorial to UKSG eNews provides a welcome opportunity to again consider essential factors in my organisation’s successful implementation of a discovery layer. Hopefully, these reflections will provide transferable insights for others. At the Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado, USA, the process of discovery service adoption – from inception through customisation – was a response to the question: “What do we want to create together?” This query emerged following significant re-purposing, re-organi sing, and retooling within the organisation (Somerville & Farner, ' Appreciative Inquiry: A transformative approach for initiating shared leadership and organizational learning '), in response to tumultuous and unrelenting changes within the scholarly community ecosystem (Somerville, Schader & Sack, ' Improving the discoverability of scholarly content in the Twenty - First Century: Collaboration opport unities for librarians, publishers, and vendors '; Somerville & Conrad, ' Discoverability challenges and collaboration opportunities within the scholarly communications ecosystem '). At the same time, numerous research studies were documenting the fact that the library website was no longer an integral part of many researchers’ workflow. So we agreed to answer the question: “If Google can do it, why can’t libraries?