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Interview

	Carme Prats i Joaniquet Programme Coordinator for the Territorial System of the mNACTEC

“I would like the System to become a network of exemplary museums”	At the end of the sixties, to become the first woman in Pont de Suert withy a university degree had involved serving an internship in Lleida and “forced” emigration to Barcelona. In the summer, she spent “a couple of hours a day” typing, sewing and embroidering, studying French, music, the piano or painting. From the age of eighteen, her travels in countries such as Israel, the UK, Russia and the USA lent another dimension to her training. In the early days of Spain 's return to democracy she taught science and mathematics at the Hogar de Aprendizaje Nostra Senyora del Port, in Barcelona, as well as working to turn that institution into the Bàrkeno local authority school. But keen to develop new projects, and being a biologist by training, she took up a post at the Museu de Zoologia in Barcelona.
While at the education department of the Museu de Zoologia in Barcelona she was initiated into museology and did her doctoral thesis on scientific communication in exhibitions, as well as spending some time at King's College and the Natural History Museum in London . In 1989 she accepted the post of director of the Department of Exhibitions and Public Programmes at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales ( Madrid ). Having spent five years dividing the week between work and family, she exchanged Madrid for Terrassa and joined the mNACTEC. A year later she returned to a post with Barcelona city council: Director for Heritage at the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, founding the Observatori Científic de la Ciutat Mediterrània (Mediterranean Scientific Observatory) and creating virtual scientific routes at www.bcn.es/medcinecies, and the online magazine latalaia. Subsequently, a spell at the Subdirectorate General for the Cultural Heritage brought her back to a territory-wide viewpoint.	What would you stress about the mNACTEC's Territorial System? If when I left Madrid I decided to come to Terrassa it was because the project for a “museum system” spread across the territory seemed fascinating and highly interesting. Also, the first permanent exhibition, Energeia , had been started and it had to be set on the right track. I was there for over a year, getting great satisfaction from my work. However, things are the way they are, and after that year of intense work I was offered a post at the Institut Municipal de Cultura, which I accepted. Years later, my undertaking with the Culture Department having been competed, I asked to return to the mNACTEC to devote myself to the Territorial System. And now I am working alongside Eusebi Casanelles to consolidate a project which he has never ceased to drive forwards and which I share both in spirit and in form. What projects are in hand at the moment? The most important thing is to make the functional operation of the System by programmes a reality. We have also started working on two fronts to make the mNACTEC and its System a showcase for investigators and advanced research, and to evaluate society's perception of science and technology. Finally, through many of the local authorities whose museums are in the System, we have made a commitment to industrial tourism as part of the Plan to Maximise the Tourism Product 2006-2008, promoted by XATIC, a network of municipalities with industrial heritage which seek to attract tourists. Where should the System be heading? The main potential of the mNACTEC's Territorial System, with its 25 science and technology museums spread across the country, lies in its organisational model. The networking model and the system of working by programmes mean that any initiative, exhibition, publication, etc. that is created within the System can swiftly reach all the other centres. The System will be working well when anything that happens at one end of it is noticed and has an effect on all its other extremities. On the other hand, to belong to the mNACTEC's Territorial System is to belong to one of Catalonia's national museums, and hence each component in it is a part of the mNACTEC and has, overall, a dimension of a higher order that allows it to share projects on a scale that would beyond its individual resources. One wish for the System? I would like it to be a network of museums that is admired by scholars and popular with the general public as a way to spend their leisure hours, due to suitable funding that makes it possible for its services and programmes to attain standards of excellence.