5. Talking About Metadata Labor: Social Science Data Archives, Professional Data Librarians, and the Founding of IASSIST

Contemporary calls for collecting, preserving, and repurposing huge stores of digital social science data within “cyberinfrastructure” are not entirely new. Similar sentiments decades ago motivated the development of what came to be known by the late 1960s as “social science data archives” or SSDAs. These information infrastructures promised a systematized solution to the problem of making social activity visible and intelligible to social science researchers, while relying on the long work hours, creative insights, and collegial collaboration of a hidden network of social data curators. This chapter describes how some of these data curators came together in the late 1970s to form a new professional organization called the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology, or IASSIST—not only to make their own collective data curation work more visible but also to make the social science data archives themselves more sustainable. Building this professional identity and peer network was a crucial, voluntary, and undervalued labor challenge, essential to advertising the existence, circulating the products, disseminating the best practices, and realizing the value proposition of the SSDAs themselves.