Illuminate the Past, Preserve it for the Future

Using SKCA, archivists have multiple ways to present their collections to scholars, extending access to researchers around the world and increasing the potential for outreach beyond the scholars/others who are already familiar with their collections. For example, the Sequoyah National Research Center in Little Rock Arkansas has the largest (and probably the most important) collection of Native American materials in the world. They have memorabilia, documents, newspapers, manuscripts, artwork – much of it unique – that is invaluable to researchers, many of whom may not ever make the trip to Little Rock Arkansas, and who wouldn’t know where these materials are without SKCA.

SKCA offers a way to describe materials in “batches” (e.g., collections, series, containers, items) and then add to the description as time goes on, or simply add inventory lists. And, it offers ways to easily input data and manipulate it from there. For example, a large county Archives has a single archivist, a warehouse of unprocessed materials, and a team of volunteers. The archivist has designed a spreadsheet with columns that match fields in SKCA records.The volunteers go thru the boxes, identify what they have found in the spreadsheet with each row describing a folder within a box. The archivist then reviews the spreadsheet and copies and pastes the entire spreadsheet into SKCA as an archival “inventory list.”