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 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?
