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 features three lightning talks and one 15-20 minute presentation exploring the practical realities of collection development — from deciding what to acquire, to what to keep, to how shifting formats and technologies are reshaping the process. A joint Q&A will follow.
Strategic Collecting: When Less Is More(Lightning Talk) Malia Van Heukelem, University of Hawaii at Manoa Library This case study reflects on a move towards responsible stewardship of archives. By establishing criteria in a collections development policy and having conversations with donors about what is most valuable for research, this approach improves the user experience — smaller collections are processed more quickly, using less material, storage space, and staff time.
What Do You Do with 30,000 Photographs?(Lightning Talk) Zoe Adams, American Institute of Physics This talk presents the workflow developed, and lessons learned, from culling an acquisition of over 30,000 born-digital photographs into a collection of 2,457 images to preserve at the AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
Streaming Video in a Shifting Landscape: The Unique Acquisition of Ethnic Studies Titles Leticia Wiggins and Vincent Albarano, The Ohio State University Streaming media acquisition has become an increasingly challenging yet essential process within higher education in recent years. This experiential research highlights the acquisition process for pursuing ethnic studies-related titles and includes guidance toward alternative options for meeting streaming video requests.
What's Happened to Our Film Collections? An Early-Research Perspective on the Changing Content of Library Film Collections(Lightning Talk) Ratna Dhaliwal, University of Saskatchewan Has the content of academic libraries' owned film collections changed with the increasing move towards streaming services and subscription content? This early-research talk explores the question.
