Visual Resources Association Bulletin

State of the Association

Xiaoli Ma — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:10:53 +0000

Over the past year, the Visual Resources Association has sustained its dynamism while enhancing its operations. A major milestone was the November integration of a new service into membership management, led by Implementation Manager Meghan Rubenstein with invaluable assistance from Lise Hawkos. The online merch shop, constructed by Maria Nuccilli, broadens member engagement. Core activities continue through workshops, presentations, and small-group gatherings, facilitated by the Regional Workshop Programs, the Summer Educational Institute, the Equitable Action Committee, and the Membership Committee. The association’s journal, the Visual Resources Association Bulletin, is advancing toward gold-standard open access. Financial support remains active for member projects and conference attendance, with renewed collaboration with ARLIS to sustain the Summer Educational Institute. The Code of Conduct is under review, and the Education Committee has been renamed the Programming Committee to better reflect its scope. The Board also thanks members’ participation in the Future Forward Breakfast at 2025 annual conference and positions the upcoming 2026 annual conference as an opportunity to grow the community. The speech closes with a call to get involved to sustain VRA’s momentum and impact.

Fiscal Year 2025 Visual Resources Association Treasurer’s Report

Will Fenton — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:22:49 +0000

This article contains the Visual Resources Association (VRA) Annual Treasurer’s Report provided at the VRA’s Mid-Year Business Meeting on March 27, 2026. The report summarizes the end-of-fiscal-year finances for 2025.

2025 VRA Awards Recipients & Recognition

Ann McShane, April Martin — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:21:48 +0000

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) presented two awards to twenty-one deserving individuals at the 43rd annual conference in Portland, Oregon on October 9th, 2025.

The 2025 recipient of the VRA Distinguished Service Award (DSA) is Johanna Bauman, Associate Director for Collections Management, Pratt Institute Libraries.

Twenty applicants were selected as recipients of the 2025 vrcHost Membership Awards, including Jung Soo Bae, Filippia Cheilitsi, Daniel Cichowlas, Claire Cirocco, Jori Dale, Aurora Daniel, Christine Gindhart, Abdelmoniem Mohammed Gomaa, Lacey Prpić Hedtke, Noah Krasman, Andrea Linsmeier, Caroline Moore, Sruthi Nanam, Olivera Nastic, Wen Nie Ng, Erin Robinson, Ruth Thomas, Saija Wilson, and two anonymous awardees.

Remaining Resilient

Allan T. Kohl, Lael J. Ensor-Bennett, Sara Schumacher — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:37:50 +0000

This article brings together excerpts from an interview conducted by Lael Ensor-Bennett and Sara Schumacher with Allan Kohl, long-time Visual Resources Association member and former president. It offers a dive into the history of the organization as it intertwines with his own half a century of librarianship, reflecting perspectives on the history and value of the profession and the VRA. What brought us together in the past, and what keeps us together today? How might VRA shape a career? How have we handled significant changes, including the momentous shift from analog slides to digital images, and how do we remain resilient in the present?

Imagining Impossible Virtual Worlds

Lucas McGill — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:56:52 +0000

Using modern archival theory and semi-structured interviews, this article examines how the online communities of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMO) Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) preserve their digital cultural heritage through unofficial private servers that reconstruct past eras of the game. Drawing on 15 interviews with players and developers across multiple private servers, the article argues that these private servers produce imagined records as developers piece together a virtual world from incomplete sources, collective memory, and creative reinterpretation. In doing so, they function analogously to community archives and serve as living archives, even as they lack the organizational structures and formal recordkeeping practices that define institutional archives. Player interviews highlight the affective resonances of reconnecting to past eras of the game, while developer interviews reveal the technical, social, legal, and archival challenges that complicate long-term sustainability.

Digitizing and Enhancing Dry Plate Glass Negatives

John Macdonald, Paige Harris — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This case study breaks down the process of digitizing dry plate glass negatives with detailed steps that were developed via careful practice and observation. Archivists in small, under-resourced institutions may find this process particularly useful, as it requires only a few tools and offers instructions for preserving a photographic format that is commonly found in archives but can be intimidating to approach. The article discusses techniques for capturing high-quality digital photographs of the negatives, as well as methods through which the images can be significantly enhanced, namely, a combination of camera RAW settings and Adobe Photoshop. In this collection, each photograph of the glass plate negatives had a total of five adjustments, resulting in a polished product that is ready to be uploaded to a digital repository and otherwise shared with the public. The two camera RAW filters, Shadows and Clarity, restored a sizable amount of detail in each of the photographs; the remaining three adjustment layers, Invert, Black/White filter, and Levels, worked in cohesion to reverse the negative state of the images and increase overall clarity. Through these processes, this small Archive has supplemented original, delicate glass plates that cannot be exposed to light for extended periods and are largely undiscoverable to research communities into polished digital files.