The authors also noted the rising tide of requests for visual material and the wide variety of finding aids in various repositories. Commercial agencies are businesses that market and sell the rights to reproduction of photographs and other visual material, often soliciting work from photographers and artists. Museums, libraries and archives maintain visual collections of artifacts, prints, photographs, and film footage for public use.
Distinctions are also complicated when genre is considered.
Images considered important for their historical value once carried the label documentary as opposed to photographs that were created in the same time period and considered art or advertising. These terms have changed in meaning in an interdisciplinary, postmodern age. This is the case for many collections. The Bettman Archive, for example, provides exclusive access to the Frank Driggs collection of entertainment photography, valued as an important visual history of jazz in the United States. Differences exist more vividly in the ways photographs are arranged, described, accessed, and made available to researchers.