Introduction

The History of Work is a well known website created in the early 2000's to highlight HISCO and various datatsets that had been coded into HISCO as part of a unprecedented international initiative by more than a dozen institutes to align occupational activities across time and space.

Today, numerous others datasets have been donated to this cause and various measures (HISCAM, SOCPO, HISCLASS) have been build on top of HISCO. Moreover, other historical occupational classifications and measures have emerged, such as OCCHISCO and PST.

Here, we provide information on how to gain access to all of the resources we received from the community and that we provide as Linked Open Data.

I have been working with Dutch occupational data for over a decade and have seen various studies on women's work from ca. 1600 onwards. I am not aware that these projects have presented lists of their occupations as a 'product'. One reason for that is that the whole idea of FAIR data (especially reuse) is only beginning to sink in. But even when trying to be FAIR, there is only so much time, and people choose to invest time in publications over time invested in data, as the latter is not valued in the academic career track.

There are though, across the world, various exceptions to the rule. Basically, these exceptions are bigger datasets, such as IPUMS or Historical Sample of the Netherlands, that in addition to providing respectively census and civil registry data, also provide, what I call, auxiliary files. These are data files of entities such as places and occupations that provide on the one hand the raw archival entry and on the other hand a cleaned and standardized representation. E.g. for places in the Netherlands they would contain the Amsterdam Code and for occupations they are presented with the HISCO code. For some time now, I have been trying to gather various datasets across the world that contain these lists of occupations and their coded standards, (I call this collection 'job hoard'), and provide them as Linked Open Data as part of the History of Work collection at the International Institute of Social History (IISG).