And suddenly it's spring.

Next week, I'll be in Washington D.C. for the National Archives Preservation Conference, and I'm looking forward to a great group of speakers and hoping for some early cherry blossoms. The NARA conferences are always worthwhile, and I commend the proceedings of their past conferences to your attention. This will be the first conference since David Ferriero took the reigns as the Archivist of the United States and I think it's fitting that he has an agenda that looks like a very good immersion into the best current thinking on making preservation work in political, financial and organizational terms.

The D.C. area is a national hotbed of preservation activity, with enough activity in the federally supported museums, libraries and archives that I'm hesitant to list them for fear of missing someone. Outside of the institutional base in D.C., however, I think that the Washington Conservation Guild is notable. They have a great speaker's series the likes of which I'd like to see us get started here in Los Angeles. We've certainly got the audience and a great wealth of conservation expertise, so if only we can get them through traffic on the 10 and 405 a couple times a year, we'll be all set.

In March, you can look forward to information about Portico, a digital preservation service that UCLA Library supports; another episode on the process of managing and optimizing conservation environments; and the Great Paste Update, concerning paste-making tools and technology, the use of hypodermic syringes to keep paste in good condition and make it easy to apply, and a short history of sticking things together, in order that you might understand why conservators are so interested in paste to begin with.