JA Pryse, Lead Archivist III and Curator
About
I am a digital archivist, curator, and archival researcher with 14 years of experience in congressional and cultural heritage repositories. I currently serve as Lead Archivist III and Curator at The Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary’s in Notre Dame, Indiana, where I am one of the two founding archivist for a collaborative archive uniting ten congregations of Catholic women religious and their sponsored ministries. In this role, I am responsible for establishing archival infrastructure, policies, and digital systems from the ground up to preserve and provide access to the documentary heritage of women religious in the United States.
I previously served as Senior Archivist III and Curator at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center Archives and as an Instructor of Information Science at the University of Oklahoma. I hold an M.L.I.S. in Digital Content Management, an M.S. in Museum Science, and a Ph.D. in Information Science with a focus on Archival Informatics.
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Research
My research focuses on archival information systems, digital preservation, metadata strategy, and workflow design in cultural heritage environments. I am particularly interested in how information moves through systems, how barriers emerge across human and technical components, and how structured, data-driven models can improve efficiency, consistency, and long-term sustainability.
My work examines the relationship between data, people, systems, and process in archival settings, with an emphasis on building adaptable methodologies for large-scale preservation and access initiatives.
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Large-Scale Projects
I lead and contribute to large-scale archival initiatives that emphasize access, standardization, preservation, and usability across complex repository environments.
At The Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary’s, I am developing a collaborative archival program that brings together collections from ten congregations of Catholic women religious into a unified preservation and access framework. This work includes designing archival policies, processing workflows, access protocols, digital preservation systems, and collaborative infrastructure to support long-term stewardship and discovery.
At the Carl Albert Center, in partnership with the University of West Virginia, the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, the Dirksen Congressional Center, and the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, I contributed to work supported by $1.5 million in congressionally directed spending to expand the utility, usability, and capacity of the American Congress Digital Archives Portal and to support K–12 civics and history education.
Visit Select Projects and Grants for a detailed list.
Current Ongoing Projects
Heritage and Research Center at Saint Mary’s
Founding archivist for a collaborative archive uniting ten congregations of Catholic women religious and their sponsored ministries. This work includes establishing archival policies, access protocols, digital preservation infrastructure, and collaborative workflows to support unified stewardship and public access.
Congressional Portal Project
A repository for workflows, methodologies, instructional materials, controlled vocabularies, and related documentation supporting large-scale archival efficiency and automation strategies for congressional collections.
Archives Handwriting Text Extraction and Analysis Project
A project developed to create and test flexible handwriting text extraction and cleaning tools using local processing environments and AWS Textract, allowing repositories to tailor workflows to their own infrastructure and project needs.
“Understanding the Evolution of Political Campaign Advertisements over the Last Century”
A collaborative research project involving the Carl Albert Center Archives, Harvard University, and the University of Iowa, supported through National Science Foundation funding.
For More Information
For more information about my current research, please email me at japryse@ou.edu.