STAR Knowledge Center for Archives (SKCA) is a fully web-based application for managing your archival collections and associated digital resources. It provides for your:

• accessioning donations/acquired items, tracking donors/sources, generating deeds of gift, associating important printed or electronic documents with an accessions record and, optionally, if you are using STAR/Libraries MARC or SKCL MARC, transferring accessions records into your Library catalog (“common accessioning”). [Several of these functions are available in full staff session only]
• describing and maintaining a catalog of your archival collections, with the hierarchical relationships and levels of description deemed appropriate for each—and associating records at any level with one or more digital resources and, optionally, if you are also using SKCL MARC, using MARC authorities for Creator and Subject terms
• managing your research services
• searching within and across collections and displaying records within their hierarchies.
• displaying an automatically generated online Finding Aid report and Hierarchy report.
• generating finding aids in EAD (.xml) format, dynamically from your catalog records, for publishing to a web site, sharing with other archives, and/or linking to the online Finding Aid report display. [available in full staff session only]
• managing the physical locations of your inventory.

SKCA also allows you to provide browser-based public or intranet access to your collections, implementing one or more of several configurable options for browsing by collections, by creator and subject terms, and the results of pre-defined new acquisitions, hot topic searches, and other advanced saved searches that users can recall and modify.

The application includes two STAR Web session files: an end-user Public Catalog session that provides search and report generation/Finding Aid options and a Staff session for managing your operations and performing various administrative/application management tasks.

Use of both sessions at the same time, from a single desktop, requires that two license slots be used. The Staff Session requires a full STAR license but the Public Catalog session can be used with either a full or search-only license.

To learn more about the Staff session, read the overview sections listed below and, while working in a given module, the more detailed Help that is specific to that part of the application. Help for the Public Catalog session is available from that session.

STAR Web Sessions Modules/Tasks Search Tasks — Search Pages Report Pages — Report Generation Working in the Input Window: Adding and Editing Records Global Update Action Tasks Application Databases