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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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.
