The museums world has been getting back to basics. Earlier this year the Museums Association published its new report Collections for the Future - one of its authors, Maurice Davies, explained the thinking behind it in Museum News 75 - which stimulated a lot of debate within the profession about the fundamentals of the curator's business: what gets collected and what gets disposed of.

The latter is a lot easier - most curators are still reluctant to dispose of any item in their collections. Lots of good intellectual (and practical) reasons are put forward for this view, but basically it goes against the grain and that's it.

Acquisitions leave a lot more scope for discussion and dissent. Most curators will tell you that museums and galleries that do not add to their collections on a regular basis are in danger of becoming moribund. And there's nothing worse than a dead collection, they will tell you. If the museum is to be vibrant then the collection must be continually refreshed. It must grow.

There is a flaw in that argument which is just worth mentioning before we move on. Most museum collections are not on display. The estimates vary but no one would argue with only 20% and few would seriously dispute 10% if you were to suggest it. Why then do they need more? One reason - it is said - is that museums are like collectors, continually striving to improve their collections, to get the very best to show you and me. Fine. Shame they don't offload some of the poorer stuff, then. Another reason is that they need to fill gaps in their collections - gaps which inhibit their ability to tell the best stories in their galleries. Fair enough. But why then do so many museums have so many incomplete "stories" running? Isn't that a bit inefficient and wasteful ?

Putting aside these doubts, this year has certainly seen the big guns rolling out to bang on about collections. Charles Saumarez Smith, positively groaning under the weight of his dual responsibilities - Director of the National Gallery and President of the Museums Association - has led the call for more money (taxpayers' money of course) to be made available for acquisitions. Huge sums are, of course, needed from government, the lottery, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and sponsors to buy top art like the Madonna of the Pinks. It must be obvious to everyone that the National Gallery and our other National Museums and Galleries need more and we dare not let any of those works of art by foreigners escape our grasp. Rule Britannia.

Of course, the pursuit of acquisitions is not just confined to the grander end of the museums world. Equally important is that smaller, local museums have the opportunity to preserve examples of local history - human and natural - for posterity. They have similar problems to their larger brethren, albeit on a different financial scale. The collections of almost all of our regional and local museums are overwhelmingly made up of donations from local people. Some collections are the result of the vision (or obsession if you prefer) of professional curators. But the majority - by number if not perhaps by perceived importance - are made up of local donations, often in ones or twos, sometimes in hundreds at a time. The result was: collections which - in a curious and mostly unscientific way - reflect what local people think ought to be in a museum. The local museum was in a real sense their museum.

I say was. Things began to change in the 1970s. First of all the people running local museums - principally the local authorities - were persuaded that their museums needed to be professionalised. And so they began to appoint professional curators. The old breed of curator had acquired his or her knowledge through contact with same collections and local people for years. They were themselves part of the local scene - along with the librarian, the solicitor, the town clerk and so on. They included some wonderful individuals and a fair number of charlatans drawing a small salary for not a lot. Gradually, in the 1970s and 1980s, they were ousted by a new breed of curator with qualifications (usually a degree but increasingly also a postgraduate certificate or such like in something called museum studies or museology). They knew how to "drive a museum" (a popular expression at the time - invented by the first Museum Studies university department in the world - at Leicester) and gradually began to draw their inspiration and guidance from the profession rather than the people.

The second thing that happened came along at about the same time. People began to think that redundant stuff in their homes, on their farms, even in their factories, must be worth something. And why did they start to think that way? Because television told them so. The Antiques Roadshow first appeared in 1979 and although on its own for many years it established the principal that it was always possible that you might just have something valuable at home. It did stick very much to traditional or conventional antiques. More recently the message has been that anybody might and almost certainly does have something that they could get money for. Programmes with titles like Bargain Hunt, Car Booty, Cash in the Attic and Flog It! have mushroomed (and these are only the BBC titles). In less than a generation, the traditional source of local museum collections - donations - has been wiped out and with it an important link between real people and the museum.

Additions at the 'top end' of the business are very expensive. But more humble acquisitions are also difficult to secure. No one knows how many thousands of container loads of antiques - mostly our local heritage - have been shipped to America in recent decades, the victims of inadequate export controls. There is nothing wrong with a thriving antiques trade. But how far are ordinary people aware of what is going on?

Where does this leave us? Well, the curators are now firmly in control not only of what we see in our museums but what stuff is added to the collections. Is there a case for more public debate about what meagre resources are used for? Is this something too important to simply leave to the curators? We at National Heritage think it is.

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