Eric Breitung is a physical organic chemist with ten years of industrial research experience in coatings and thin-films. He began working in the field of art conservation science in 2006 as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art&#39&#59;s Department of Scientific Research, where he developed novel methods for treating and producing scratch resistant large-format face-mounted photographs. A side project focused on novel anti-tarnish coatings for the protection of silver objects developed into an NSF funded grant with collaborators at the University of Maryland and The Walters Art Museum. He has also studied natural and synthetic dyes in Central Asian Ikat textiles at the Smithsonian Institution and is now focusing on modern materials research at the Library of Congress in the Preservation Research and Testing Division. At the Library, The Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division not only houses hundreds of thousands of objects on modern media such as magnetic tape and optical discs, it is in the process of digitizing its collection onto high density magnetic tape. All modern media are subject to degradation, and Eric is focusing on understanding how best to preserve and care for old and new materials used to maintain both digital and analog information. He also runs a consulting business, E-squared Art Conservation Science, which is based in the Washington DC area.