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Last week we presented the CATICAT project in a press conference, an online collective catalog of musical instruments present in museums and public collections in Catalonia. It is a window into Catalan musical heritage that offers a unique access point to around 4,000 instruments from 31 museums in the region.

The project started in 2001, led by the Museu de la Música de Barcelona, with the aim of locating, inventorying, and documenting all public collections of musical instruments in the country. In this first phase, more than 1,500 instruments from collections of 17 institutions were documented. The results of these initial research campaigns shaped the first database, with about twenty fields describing the name of the object, dimensions, authorship, place, inscriptions, organological classification, and much more.

Over the next two decades, digitization became prevalent, thus enabling massive and almost unlimited access to information on collections, works of art, and heritage in general worldwide. Additionally, heritage institutions have developed standards and guidelines for the cataloging of works of art and for the digital images that identify them.

Given this context, it was essential to update the project. In 2020, the Centre Robert Gerhard, which works to promote and disseminate Catalan musical heritage, resumed the project with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya to complete and expand the information collected in the first stage and publish it on a specific website that allows the consultation of all existing instruments in Catalonia from anywhere in the world. The web portal has been carried out with the companies Coeli, Edittio, and Veraicon.

This is a long-term initiative; the CATICAT project now has the presence of 31 participating institutions, and we hope for the incorporation of other museums that have items in their collections that can be part of this project. Currently, we have identified about fifty and are open to receiving proposals from other institutions that do not yet participate. We take this opportunity to announce that the collection of musical instruments from the Museu Etnològic i Cultures del Món de Barcelona, with nearly 800 instruments, will soon be added, which will significantly expand the resources available on the web.

This project is inspired by well-established initiatives such as MIMO, Musical Instrument Museums Online, a group project part of Europeana, which aims to provide access from a single website to digital information about musical instruments found in major museums worldwide. MIMO was born as a consortium of the main European music museums and is currently the world's largest free database on musical instruments from public collections.

From a national perspective, CATICAT is based on projects like the British MINIM-UK, Musical Instruments Interface for Museums and Collections, led by the Royal College of Music in London, which provides access to about 20,000 musical instruments in around a hundred British museums, or the French Base Nationale des Instruments de Musique de la Philarmonie de París, led by the Musée de la Musique de París, which integrates the collections of a total of 105 museums and covers more than 9,000 instruments.

CATICAT is, therefore, the national platform for the dissemination of instrument collections as part of Catalan musical heritage, on par with the main European collections.

Currently participating museums

Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer, Masia d’en Cabanyes, Museu Arqueològic Comarcal de Banyoles, Museu del Cau Ferrat, Museu de Manresa, Museu Darder – Espai d’Interpretació de l’Estany, Museu Frederic Marès, Museu del Joguet de Catalunya, Museu de Maricel, Museu de Mataró, Museu de la Música de Barcelona, Museu Nacional de la Ciència i de la Tècnica de Catalunya, Museu Palau Mercader, Museu Pau Casals, Museu de la Pesca, Museu Romàntic Can Llopis, Museu Romàntic Can Papiol, Museu Etnogràfic de Ripoll, Museu Etnològic del Montseny – La Gabella, Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol, Museu de Lleida, Museu de Tortosa, Museu Diocesà i Comarcal de Solsona, Musèus dera Val d’Aran, Museu – Tresor de la Catedral de Girona, Museu de la Mediterrània, Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya – Girona, Museu de l’Empordà, Museu d’Història de Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Museu de la Noguera and Museu Comarcal de la Conca de Barberà.