  The (rest-frame) near-IR domain contains important stellar population
diagnostics and is often used to estimate masses of galaxies at low as well as
high redshifts. However, many stellar population models are still relatively
poorly calibrated in this part of the spectrum. To allow an improvement of this
calibration we present a new database of integrated near-infrared JHKs
magnitudes for 75 star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds, using the 2-Micron
All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The majority of the clusters in our sample have robust
age and metallicity estimates from color-magnitude diagrams available in the
literature, and populate a range of ages from 10 Myr to 15 Gyr and a range in
[Fe/H] from -2.17 to +0.01 dex. A comparison with matched star clusters in the
2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC) reveals that the XSC only provides a good
fit to the unresolved component of the cluster stellar population. We also
compare our results with the often-cited single-channel JHK photometry of
Persson and collaborators, and find significant differences, especially for
their 30"-diameter apertures up to ~2.5 mag in the K-band, more than 1 mag in
J-K, and up to 0.5 mag in H-K. Using simulations to center apertures based on
maximum light throughput (as performed by Persson et al, we show that these
differences can be attributed to near-IR-bright cluster stars (e.g., Carbon
stars) located away from the true center of the star clusters. The wide age and
metallicity coverage of our integrated JHKs photometry sample constitutes a
fundamental dataset for testing population synthesis model predictions, and for
direct comparison with near-IR observations of distant stellar populations.
