Homeless services systems provide unhoused individuals access to emergency shelter, subsidized housing, and other life-sustaining resources. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that draws on the experiences of fifteen social service workers to examine how recordkeeping practices sustain homeless services systems and unite a tangled web of institutions and actors, including public housing systems, nonprofit agencies, and local governments. We address the following research questions: How is the infrastructure of homeless services sustained by recordkeeping? How are social service workers affected by increasing recordkeeping demands? In what ways do social service workers work against or ‘find the play’ in this system? To address these questions, we collected interviews and conducted artifact walkthroughs with our study participants. We analyzed the data using an infrastructural lens and found that current recordkeeping practices within homeless services systems comprise an "infrastructure of last resort" that functions logistically, prioritizing efficiency and speed. We also found that social service workers “speak back” to logistification by making the homeless services infrastructure more legible to their unhoused clients through mediation and acts of translation that help to produce better resource outcomes. Our findings show how structuring recordkeeping in ways that privilege efficiency and speed disrupts social service work and interferes with social service workers’ ability to provide care for vulnerable individuals facing life-altering and life-threatening hardships.

Social work professions are increasingly studied as key sites for understanding precarity, affective labor, and the future of care work. However, little research has explored social workers' recordkeeping practices. This study expands on existing research on records and documentation through engaging with users of "R/Socialwork," a subforum on the internet forum Reddit.com. Utilizing a multimodal approach drawing on participant observation, indepth interviewing, and discourse analysis, this research sought to answer the following research question: How do social workers understand their use of and interaction with records? Findings indicated widespread frustration with documentation paradigms in the profession, with variation based on sub-field and proximity to clinical practice. Users expressed this frustration in a variety of ways, with some utilizing the forum to support entrepreneurial approaches to problems in the field, while others used the site as an alternative form of recordkeeping, documenting their emotional responses.