When you walk into a museum or a gallery, what do you see? Artefacts, obviously; documents, perhaps. Paintings. But there's a lot you don't see.  It's a question that the Heritage Council has been pondering - and now it hopes to ensure that all our institutions are up to scratch, writes Arminta Wallace

You don't see strategic plans or acquisitions policies or the qualifications of the people who run the institution, yet these are as crucial to enjoying the experience as the objects in front of your eyes. In 1984 Ireland had 120 heritage institutions. Recent estimates put the figure at 221 and growing. And they are a diverse bunch. Under "collectable object" you can file the illuminated Koranic manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Library, in Dublin, the van-and-truck collection of the National Transport Museum, in Howth, and King Henry VIII's cap from Waterford Treasures - and that's without mentioning such wider aspects of heritage as craft skills, archeological sites and traditional folk tunes.

Many of our museums are run on a shoestring by dedicated individuals; others are large operations with significant public funding. So you might imagine that it would be impossible to come up with a standard, a sort of museum quality-assurance mark, to which all of them would aspire. But last week the Heritage Council launched a policy document for the museum sector that did just that.

After years of intensive consultation and a pilot scheme involving a dozen institutions, the council has come up with a detailed proposal for a standards and accreditations scheme that, it says, can be effectively applied to all. "We looked at seven categories of museum operation and then devised approximately 30 standards," explains Eithne Verling of the council.

"Or, rather, we just facilitated the process. The impetus for this exercise in self-assessment came entirely from within the sector. There's a self-levelling suspension built in whereby the standards, though measurable and not negotiable, reflect the scale of each museum. For example, an education policy is a prerequisite and must be provided, but the education policy that you'd expect from the transport museum in Howth, which is a totally voluntarily-run museum, would be quite different to what you'd expect from the National Gallery or the Chester Beatty Library."

The National Gallery of Ireland was one of the institutions that took part in the pilot process - an experience that was in itself a learning curve for all involved, says the gallery's head of education, Marie Bourke. Simply getting museum folk around a table to share their expertise created new networks of shared information with immediate practical impact. "I remember at one of our first meetings somebody saying, 'What's a visitor comment form?' And I said, well, look, I'm coming to open an exhibition for you next month: why don't I bring one of ours, to show you? By the time I got there she had her form already out on display.

"Or you'd be sitting in the pub afterwards with people from a gallery, and they were tearing their hair out over this or that document, and you'd say, 'Get onto the British Museum - they're very good on that.' At another session, people were saying: 'Everybody says our labels are too small. What's the right size? What's the best colour?' These are such small things, but it's often this level of detail that gets forgotten."

The scheme was drawn up with one eye on international practice, especially in other postcolonial countries, such as Canada and New Zealand, where, it was felt, heritage would share similar concerns with Ireland. But one area in which the Republic has been at a particular disadvantage is that of training. Many museum and gallery staff here have had little or no formal training, so the Heritage Council sees the setting up of academically recognised courses as a priority.

"We've developed a diploma in museum studies and cultural management, which we hope will be delivered through distance education in module form," says Verling. The council, which is talking to third-level institutions about the diploma, is also hoping to develop a leadership programme that would involve high- level managers in and around the sector, from directors of national institutions to chief executives of tourism agencies.

"We've taken advice on this from the Getty Museum in California. We feel there needs to be more cultural debate and analysis in Ireland, and a week-long brainstorming session once a year would create a very good forum for that to happen."

Back in the day-to-day world, it has become increasingly clear that for many 21st-century cultural institutions a constructive relationship with their local authority is going to be vital. "Galleries, museums and archives share common functions. Collecting, for instance, is a core function, and so is conservation. Education is common to all, as is the question of storage.

"So it makes sense for local authorities, and it makes for a more robust cultural infrastructure, if you rationalise those common areas," says Verling. "Not to do a yellow-pack approach and just bung them all into one building, because then you get less than the sum of the parts, but take the example of Sligo, for instance. They have been looking at putting together a 'cultural corridor' which would include the Niland Arts Centre, and they're building a new museum and a new library.

"There are a lot of possibilities to be inventive with that model both in terms of outreach and in terms of getting funding. Often it's a matter of joining the dots, of saying, look, you can save money in the long run and provide a better resource for the community."

For the average visitor to an Irish museum or gallery over the coming months and years, the Heritage Council's proposed standards and accreditation scheme may not appear to have very much impact. What you see in an exhibition may be done to the highest standards, but that doesn't mean you'll find it particularly interesting or rewarding. "This is very much a first step," says Verling, "a putting of our house in order, if you like. The next step will be in assessing what museums and galleries are all about. Definitions of heritage are widening to include such intangible traditions as folklore and community involvement. There is also huge potential for museums to engage with the landscape and with the built environment."

As anyone will agree who has been to one of our most up-to-date exhibition centres - the National Museum of Ireland's highly praised folk-life displays at the Museum of Country Life, at Turlough Park in Co Mayo, for instance - it's all a long way from the fuddy-duddy image the word "museum" used to conjure up.

But before any of this brave new museum world comes to pass, the standards and accreditation scheme will have to be adopted as official policy, which will in turn require some serious action from the government departments involved: Environment, Heritage and Local Government; Arts, Sport and Tourism; and, inevitably, Finance.

Verling remains optimistic. "We at the Heritage Council would like to see the roll-out of this scheme next year. There is a lot of expectation from the sector, and we'd like to deliver. It makes everybody's job easier, and it makes sense."

Virginia Teehan

Hunt Museum, Limerick

"We were really privileged to have taken part in this project. There have been very tangible results for us: we developed new policies about collections care, and an acquisitions policy, and we're currently working with PriceWaterhouseCoopers on a business plan. It has made the museum staff and board look at the way it's set up and constituted and also at the detail of what we do and how we do it.

"This is crucial because heritage is no longer seen as series of singular little boxes. People now take a more holistic approach to history. For example, instead of just looking at buildings, we might look at building methods - and thentake a further step back and look at craft skills and how they transfer from one generation to another. It's a much bigger view of the past, and as our society changes and becomes more diverse those of us who work in heritage have to be careful to approach it in as inclusive a way as we can."

Eamonn McEneaney

Waterford Treasures

"Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses, and it makes you realise that there are whole areas you must look at. We'd be strong on exhibitions and education policies, but this made us focus on strategic planning, disaster plans, things like that. In museums with a small number of staff, you really need to plan in advance, and when you put it all down on paper you realise how little time there actually is in a year.

"I still think that in the long term there should be something like a museums council for the whole of Ireland. We need to grow up and do things on a professional rather than an ad-hoc basis. Every time you see a building of great historic value - or, in some cases, little historic value - becoming vacant, you get a local community setting up a museum, often without resources or back-up. And often, with the best of intentions, they may be inadvertently placing objects in danger.

Museums have to be sustainable. Not that we're all museumed out, but if you compare the museum sector here with the library sector, the latter is much better organised and has standards right across the board."

Grace Mulqueen

Knock Museum, Co Mayo

"There was a huge amount of work in the scheme, but we can see the benefit of it all over the place. It gave us the opportunity to stand back from day-to-day operations and think about policy. Up to that point there were really very few guidelines for museums, so you were using your own judgment as to whether you were on the right track.

"These guidelines are brilliant: they spell out every step of the way. We wrote a strategic plan, we drafted a mission statement and we drew up an acquisitions policy, so we're much clearer now about what we want to accept into the collection and what we don't want.

"We changed the name of the museum. We had been called Knock Folk Museum. In the past we had placed a big emphasis on our folk collection . . . but as a result of our participation in this scheme we've decided to refocus the collection and align ourselves much more closely to the shrine, with a lot more emphasis on the religious material - which is what is unique about Knock. Some 90 per cent of our visitors are pilgrims."

Marie Bourke

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

"Even as a result of the pilot study there has been a quiet but definite raising of standards in 13 museums around the country. There isn't the shadow of a doubt about that. And a lot of the bigger museums were invited to these meetings, so they'd be watching what was going on and saying, wow, such-and-such a museum is getting its act together here, we'd better do something about this.

"This is probably the only way to globally raise the standard of museums and galleries in this country. It's a fairly rigorous process - people may not want to do it every year - but as a checklist of procedures it's a very good one. For example, say a museum approaches us to borrow a work of art. There aren't all that many museums in this country who can borrow from the National Gallery, because they don't have adequate security \ environmental conditions, but if they \ gone through the accreditation process and achieved all of their standards, we would know immediately the level of museum we were dealing with."