The MAC 2005 Program Committee is proud to introduce Ms. Alane Wilson as our Charting New Territory MAC 2005 Keynote Speaker!

Her keynote address, "Content Has Left the Container," promises to be a dynamic presentation that looks at the radical changes in information production, discovery, fulfillment and consumption and what this suggests about the role of libraries - and medical libraries in particular. Libraries have always faced a shifting world of materials, new models alongside the old, the increasingly complex matrix of commodity and open-source publications -- published, self-published and unpublished, paper and digital. Now they must also manage content that is unbound from any sort of identifiable container.

The rapid "unbundling" of content from traditional containers such as books, journals and CDs has had a significant impact on the search/find/obtain process. Digital content is often syndicated instead of being prepackaged and distributed, and access is provided on an as-needed basis to the consumer by providers outside the library space. Content is no longer format-dependent and users are not dependent on traditional distribution channels for access to content. This is true both in the realms of scholarly communication and popular materials. For librarians, this means the processes of acquisition, organization and delivery of content needs to change to accommodate the expectations of our communities.

Alane Wilson graduated from the University of British Columbia's School of Library and Information Sciences, in Vancouver, in 1986, and joined the staff of the University of Calgary Libraries the same year. In 1995, she joined the University of Alaska Fairbanks library as Head of Reference and Instructional services. Since 1997, Ms. Wilson has worked at OCLC in a variety of capacities - her more recent projects include work on the OCLC Environmental Scan. In addition to co-authoring and editing the Scan, she is one of three OCLC contributors to the "It's All Good" blog http://scanblog.blogspot.com. Ms. Wilson has indeed "charted new territory" in her life as well as in her work: she was born in London, England, is a Canadian citizen, and is married to an American!