Mike McGrath worked in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum, where he helped organise the 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition and catalogued the collection of 70,000 objects.  He transferred to the British Library on its creation in 1974.  He worked in many roles as well as being the Chair of the Trade Union Side for 14 years.  He retired in 2001 as Head of UK Marketing and worked on the review of remote services which led to the implementation of the current investment strategy.  In retirement he edits Interlending and Document Supply and remains active in document supply matters.  Most recently he gave a keynote speech at the 10th ILDS conference in Singaport in 2007, was the marketing officer for the Forum for Interlending until 2008 and ran a workshop at the UKSG conference for the last three years on document supply.

He lives in Leeds with his wife and enjoys reading all those books that he never had time to do when at the British Library.

Mike is our keynote speaker and will be speaking on "An everchanging world - threats and opportunities".

He will look at the current developments that impact on document supply services - mass digitisation, open access, end user developments, Big Deals, DRM and copyright, e-books etc.  Most of these can be seen as threats to conventional document supply services but also as opportunities.