The VRA includes over 700 members in twenty-one countries and represents slide and photograph curators, film and video librarians, media professionals, photo archivists, slide and microform producers, art historians and others concerned with visual materials. An International Journal of Documentation , published by Gordon and Breach. Visual resources collections are maintained by libraries, museums, government agencies, cultural heritage institutions, individual and corporate commercial producers, and university and college departments.
Collections range in size from a few thousand items to hundreds of thousands.
Perhaps as many as two-thirds are university collections, most of which are under the jurisdiction of academic departments of art, architecture, and art history. Although the subject emphasis has been primarily on fine arts, architecture, and cultural artifacts, many collections contain a broad spectrum of information about people, places, and political, religious, and historic events irrespective of a particular work of art or artist. Because so many of these collections fall outside the jurisdiction of libraries, they do not follow universally accepted cataloging standards, such as those provided for bibliographic materials found in AACR2. As these collections have become automated, they have used a variety of database systems. As a result, many of the newest systems that employ a relational database rather than a flat file offer far more sophisticated search capacities than do bibliographic databases.