Improved staff expertise is needed to implement, manage, and direct these efforts. Agreed-upon standards, systems, and practices make it easier to determine the requirements for training capable and effective staff. Skilled staff results in cost savings, enhanced professional contact, and greater job mobility in an information age. The most basic definition of a standard is a mutually agreed-upon designation that helps to ensure a consistent result. Standards can vary widely, from strict forms to more flexible guidelines that take account of both the needs of individual institutions and the various constraints that may govern their operations.
Conventions are more flexible than technical standards, and accommodate some local variations.
When applied correctly, they result in similar but not necessarily identical results. Guidelines are a broad set of practice or service criteria against which products or programs can be measured. Examples include style manuals for preparing and formatting publications. In the field of automation, examples of guidelines are commonly accepted systems development methodologies such as Yourdon, or even a book on how to select a computer system. For a museum, these might be the requirements for separate facilities in cataloging and collections management, membership, administration, finance, and publishing.