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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Responsible Description Presented by the Equitable Action Committee
This 60-minute lightning talk session highlights projects and policies in GLAM institutions that encourage responsible and accurate description of collection materials. Attendees will learn about projects, processes, initiatives, and workflows intended to update descriptions and add new metadata that accurately reflects the materials and communities documented in our collections.
To best represent the communities and materials in our collections, institutions should periodically examine and update the language and policies used to describe them. These efforts can take many forms — from large-scale MARC replacement workflows and updates to specific terms in finding aids, to incorporating descriptive review into assessment practices or adding new language that better represents local communities. Talks in this session may cover reparative metadata, community engagement projects, tools and workflows for updating description at scale, the creation of new vocabulary terms, and the development or implementation of policies and procedures that foster responsible description practices. Presenters represent a variety of GLAM institutions — including libraries, museums, archives, academic institutions, and public libraries — with widely varying levels of resources.
