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?
This lightning round features four short presentations, each 5-7 minutes, showcasing innovative approaches to metadata, storytelling, and access — followed by a joint Q&A.
From Records to Storytelling: How Exhibits Are Curated Through Metadata This presentation explores the role of metadata for pattern recognition, including thematic patterns and community networks across collections, as well as storytelling and exhibit curation, through a student-led project on Appalachian moonshine. From the perspective of a STEM student, it highlights the workflow of reconciling inconsistent data, identifying themes, and translating metadata into exhibit narratives.
Scalable Reparative Metadata Assessment with MaRMAT The Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT) is an open-source, Python-based application developed to analyze metadata for potentially harmful terminology. MaRMAT enables scalable metadata review and remediation by providing bulk assessment of metadata. This brief talk will focus on tool operation, report outputs, provided lexicons, and auto-generated data visualizations.
Picking Up the Torch: Revisiting the 1977 Sharing Stories Oral History Project When the Sharing Stories from 1977 team reached out to the University of Houston Libraries to let them know the next batch of oral histories was ready for hand-off, it came as a surprise. This lightning talk discusses the coordination between departments to get the materials accessioned, described, and published online.
Seeing What Standards Can't: Revealing Faded Texts Faded ink. Damaged pages. When standard reformatting falls short, how far do you push? A UW Digital Collections Center reformatting specialist shares the experiments, the judgment calls, and the path to rescuing what history almost erased.
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.
