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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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.
