What does it mean to truly look closely? This year’s VRA annual conference, Zooming In, invites visual resources professionals to shift from the wide view and settle into the details, the workflows, tools, discoveries, and community conversations that define our day-to-day practice.
Delivered fully online, VRA 2026 brings together a rich program drawn from 40+ proposals spanning panels, lightning talks, virtual tours, and more. Whether you’re navigating new roles in your institution, exploring how AI is reshaping cataloging and metadata work, grappling with collection development decisions, or finding new ways to activate and engage communities through visual collections, there’s a session built for where you are right now.
This year’s program reflects both the breadth and the depth of our field: from digitizing ancient scrolls to first-time service management, from reparative description to classroom pedagogy, and interactive digital maps. It’s a conference for asking: what happens when we look more carefully?
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Kick off VRA Virtual 2026 by joining us for a warm welcome to this year's conference, Zooming In! Before we dive into panels, lightning talks, and virtual tours, take a moment to connect with fellow visual resources professionals from across the field. Your VRA hosts will open the conference with a few opening remarks from our President, Margaret McKee, and a fun ice-breaker activity designed to help you make new connections, reconnect with familiar faces, and get in the spirit of community that makes VRA special.
This session brings together three presentations exploring how visual resources professionals are finding creative new ways to connect collections with the people who use them, from public-facing digital storytelling to classroom pedagogy. Each presenter will have 15-20 minutes to share their work, followed by a joint Q&A.
Bringing Archives to Life with Interactive Digital Maps Presenters from Queens Public Library and Urban Archive will showcase the interactive maps and stories on the Queens Name Explorer and other Urban Archive projects, demonstrating how mapping digital archives helps cultural institutions preserve visual culture while connecting the public to cultural heritage in new, engaging ways.
Animating Access: Copyright-Centered Outreach for Visual Resources While copyright can impose limitations on visual resource collections, it doesn't have to hinder their promotion and use. This presentation discusses how the University of South Florida Libraries' Special Collections framed copyright as a central component of an outreach strategy to promote a collection of heavily copyrighted materials.
Collections in the Classroom: A Case Study in Object-Based Pedagogy This presentation examines a university course built around the central question "Why is that art?" Through faculty-librarian collaboration, visually engaging objects from the collections were integrated into the curriculum to challenge students' assumptions, with results from longitudinal surveys tracking shifts in student perceptions.
This lightning round features three short presentations exploring creative, hands-on approaches to bringing collections to life for students and patrons — followed by a joint Q&A.
A New Lease on Light: Upcycling Slides for Engagement This talk describes how the JHU VRC is engaging new patrons through a cross-campus partnership with the Center for Visual Arts while upcycling deaccessioned slides into student artworks. With limited time and resources, a solo curator can promote collections and services through networking and creativity in this "use-what-you-have" approach.
Tangible → Digital → Tangible → Digital: Classroom Experiments with 'Activating' Cultural Heritage Looking to connect students with digital platforms in a tangible way? This talk highlights examples from a "Digital Archaeology" class, where students digitally "activated" 3D prints — from a video-game-inspired excavation to re-creating the sounds of an ancient instrument — demonstrating the benefits of digital engagement for tangible heritage.
Engaging Undergraduate Students with Photographs Photographs are often overlooked in undergraduate research but are imperative primary resources that help connect students to history on a deeper level than manuscript materials. How can we encourage students to engage not only with archives, but with archival photograph materials specifically?
This lightning round features four short presentations, each 5-7 minutes, showcasing innovative approaches to metadata, storytelling, and access — followed by a joint Q&A.
From Records to Storytelling: How Exhibits Are Curated Through Metadata This presentation explores the role of metadata for pattern recognition, including thematic patterns and community networks across collections, as well as storytelling and exhibit curation, through a student-led project on Appalachian moonshine. From the perspective of a STEM student, it highlights the workflow of reconciling inconsistent data, identifying themes, and translating metadata into exhibit narratives.
Scalable Reparative Metadata Assessment with MaRMAT The Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT) is an open-source, Python-based application developed to analyze metadata for potentially harmful terminology. MaRMAT enables scalable metadata review and remediation by providing bulk assessment of metadata. This brief talk will focus on tool operation, report outputs, provided lexicons, and auto-generated data visualizations.
Picking Up the Torch: Revisiting the 1977 Sharing Stories Oral History Project When the Sharing Stories from 1977 team reached out to the University of Houston Libraries to let them know the next batch of oral histories was ready for hand-off, it came as a surprise. This lightning talk discusses the coordination between departments to get the materials accessioned, described, and published online.
Seeing What Standards Can't: Revealing Faded Texts Faded ink. Damaged pages. When standard reformatting falls short, how far do you push? A UW Digital Collections Center reformatting specialist shares the experiments, the judgment calls, and the path to rescuing what history almost erased.
Responsible Description Presented by the Equitable Action Committee
This 60-minute lightning talk session highlights projects and policies in GLAM institutions that encourage responsible and accurate description of collection materials. Attendees will learn about projects, processes, initiatives, and workflows intended to update descriptions and add new metadata that accurately reflects the materials and communities documented in our collections.
To best represent the communities and materials in our collections, institutions should periodically examine and update the language and policies used to describe them. These efforts can take many forms — from large-scale MARC replacement workflows and updates to specific terms in finding aids, to incorporating descriptive review into assessment practices or adding new language that better represents local communities. Talks in this session may cover reparative metadata, community engagement projects, tools and workflows for updating description at scale, the creation of new vocabulary terms, and the development or implementation of policies and procedures that foster responsible description practices. Presenters represent a variety of GLAM institutions — including libraries, museums, archives, academic institutions, and public libraries — with widely varying levels of resources.
Cool Things We Work On Think old stuff is cool? From the weird to the wonderful, come learn about some of the coolest things our metadata, cataloging, and conservation colleagues have had the pleasure of researching and describing. One of the best parts of visual resources work is getting to explore collections that teach us something new — whether they open up unfamiliar corners of history or challenge us because of the nature of the material itself. This session highlights some of the fascinating materials our presenters have worked with over the past year, covering what the material is, where it came from, why it sparked their interest, and what the process of learning about it was like.
Brinna Michael and Chloe McLaren will introduce the world of late 1800s and early 1900s municipal sewer maps, discussing the history of the New York State Board of Health's annual reports. As part of the Cornell University Library map collections, supplemental maps from these reports offer fascinating insights into the management of municipal infrastructure through sewer maps, street profiles, and facility plans — complete with excellent examples of detailed hand-lettering. The presentation will explore how these visual supplements were used to advocate for improvements to municipal sewer works, as well as how they illustrate citizen concerns raised in the "Special Investigations" reports.
Jana Dambrogio, Matt Saba, and Oa Sjoblom will introduce a project at MIT to rehouse and describe a set of 102 binders in the Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive, a visual archive documenting the work of Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji as well as other aspects of life in Iraq from the 1940s to the 1970s. Alongside their research and aesthetic interest, these materials presented real conservation and physical arrangement challenges. The presentation will introduce the collection and its history, discuss the conservation challenges it presented, and describe how the team balanced principles of conservation with archival integrity.
Nora Davies will describe a recently re-housed and reorganized collection of around 10,000 photographs and prints — the body of work and study materials belonging to Arthur Kingsley Porter and his wife, Lucy Wallace Porter. Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933) was an American medievalist scholar-photographer who taught at Yale and Harvard until his mysterious disappearance in 1933. Lucy Wallace Porter (1876–1962) became the collection's chief photographer from 1919 onward and contributed significantly to the photographic record of art history. This presentation will share the history of the duo and what we've learned about their body of work through engaging with these materials.
