| JA Pryse, PhD | Digital Archivist, Curator & Archival Informatics Researcher |
Archives, Systems, and Access
I build archival systems for collections that are too large, complex, or distributed to be managed by traditional workflows alone.
I am a digital archivist, curator, and information science researcher working at the intersection of archives, technology, and institutional knowledge. My work centers on making complex collections more reliable, discoverable, and sustainable, from preservation infrastructure and metadata models to workflow automation, AI-assisted discovery, and public access.
I currently serve as Lead Archivist III and Curator at The Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary’s (HARC) in Notre Dame, Indiana. As one of HARC’s two founding archivists, I am helping build a collaborative archive that brings together the records of ten congregations of Catholic women religious and their sponsored ministries. The work is unusually broad: establishing archival policy and processing systems, developing digital preservation infrastructure, creating public discovery tools, and designing a shared framework for collections that originated in separate institutions.
Before HARC, I served as Senior Archivist III and Curator at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center Archives at the University of Oklahoma, where my work focused on congressional archives, large-scale digital collections, electronic records, preservation systems, and collaborative research. I also taught information science at the University of Oklahoma.
I hold a Ph.D. in Information Science, with a focus on Archival Informatics, an M.L.I.S. in Digital Content Management, and an M.S. in Museum Science.
CV · Publications · Project Portfolio · Projects & Grants
Research That Becomes Practice
My research begins with a practical question: what has to happen inside an archival information system for information to remain reliable as it moves from creation and ingest through preservation, description, and access?
I study the points where archival systems create friction, lose information, or become difficult to sustain. From there, I develop and test controls, metadata structures, training methods, and adaptive learning mechanisms that make workflows easier to understand and more dependable over time.
This work spans archival informatics, digital preservation, metadata strategy, workflow design, responsible AI, and large-scale digital asset management. A recurring theme is that technology alone does not solve archival problems. Good systems depend on the relationship between people, data, tools, institutional knowledge, and the decisions made at each stage of a workflow.
My research and professional practice are deliberately connected. I use working archives as environments for testing ideas, then turn what works into repeatable methods, documentation, software, and sustainable repository practice.
Explore my research and project portfolio →
Selected Work
HARC Archives and Digital Discovery
At HARC, I am helping create a shared archival environment for ten congregations of Catholic women religious. In addition to building the underlying archival and digital preservation infrastructure, I have developed public research pathways that connect finding aids, digital collections, a Sisters Names Index, collection browsing, research resources, and AI-assisted archival discovery.
The goal is not simply to place records online. It is to create a research environment in which collections from separate institutions can be understood, searched, and used together while preserving their original context.
Adaptive Learning Models for Archival Systems
My archival informatics research examines how adaptive learning, feedback mechanisms, and point-of-creation controls can improve archival workflows. Rather than treating AI as a stand-alone solution, I focus on how machine-assisted processes can operate inside structured archival systems, learn from correction, and support human decision-making.
This work grew from large-scale processing and digitization projects and has developed into a broader model for improving reliability, standardization, and information flow across archival systems.
American Congress Digital Archives Portal
My congressional archives work has included collaborative development of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal, a multi-institutional effort to expand access to congressional collections and strengthen their use in research, civics, and history education.
My contributions have centered on archival workflows, digital preservation, metadata, interoperability, processing methodology, and scalable approaches for bringing complex congressional collections into shared discovery environments.
Archives Handwriting Text Extraction and Analysis
This project explores flexible methods for extracting and improving text from handwritten archival documents. It was designed so that repositories can adapt the workflow to their own collections and technical environments rather than depend on a single platform.
The larger research question is equally important: how can archival systems learn the characteristics of particular writers, scripts, names, abbreviations, and recurring language so that transcription improves through use?
Political Campaign Advertisement Research
This NSF-supported collaborative research uses a large historical collection of political campaign advertisements to study changes in political communication across time. My work has focused on the archival, metadata, preservation, and computational infrastructure needed to turn a complex audiovisual collection into usable research data.
Collaboration and Contact
I am interested in projects involving digital archives, archival informatics, preservation systems, AI in cultural heritage, large-scale collections, metadata and discovery, and collaborative archival infrastructure.
For research or professional collaboration, contact me at japryse@harcsm.org.