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 centering underrepresented communities in collection development, description, and public engagement — through cross-institutional partnerships, culturally responsive metadata practices, and community-focused exhibits. A joint Q&A will follow.
Collaborative Pathways to Equitable Visual Collections A faculty-initiated partnership transformed a university's visual collection into a hybrid analog-digital archive of Black Canadian artists, culminating in a collection-based assignment that activated the new holdings. This case study models cross-institutional collaboration, equity-driven collection development, and blended instruction, repositioning visual collections as active pedagogical agents.
Embodied Archives in Practice: Community-Engaged Digitization and Ethical Description in the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources Collections at ASU This presentation examines community-engaged digitization and ethical metadata development in the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources Collections at Arizona State University. Focusing on ethnographic dance footage, it offers practical strategies for describing embodied cultural knowledge, revising legacy records, and implementing culturally responsive archival workflows within visual resource environments.
The Little LGBTQ History Exhibit that Could: An 'American Experience' on Display in Texas This is a pre-recorded tour of an exhibit highlighting activism, community, joy, and violence. It examines the impact of affect on research and archival work through tensions: balancing access and privacy, acknowledging vulnerability with the power of visibility, addressing underrepresentation while mitigating tokenism, and prioritizing community-centered perspectives under "best" professional practices.
