Accord on Foundational Staffing

The Accord on Foundational Staffing is a Concordance of the third rank governing the minimum number of persons who must be present for a floor, stairwell, or scriptorium to be considered staffed. It is numbered Concordance 177 and was recensed most recently in the winter of Y-3141, though its operative schedules have not been revised since the First Recension. Its central provision is a single sentence, much quoted and much disputed: "A post is held where a holder is present; a holder is present where the post is occupied; occupancy is not inferred from output." (Concordance 177, Article 1)

The Accord's purpose was originally narrow — to settle whether an unstaffed floor might still be counted as maintained — but the definition proved elastic, and the document is now cited in nearly every dispute concerning absence, vacancy, and the practice of Stairwell Duty.

Origin and the Vanishing Post

Concordance 177 was drafted in response to the so-called Vanishing Post of Floor 912, an episode in which the staffing manifest for that floor recorded a single clerk for one hundred and forty consecutive years while no clerk could be produced. The Ninth Concordance later established that Floor 912 had, in fact, been continuously staffed throughout, but the Department of Provenance could not determine by whom, and the resulting inquiry occupied three sub-committees before the Accord was laid before the Librarians.

The drafters concluded that the difficulty lay not in the missing clerk but in the definition. A post whose holder is unknown is not thereby vacant, they wrote, provided the post's occupancy is attested by any instrument the Accord recognizes. The instruments were listed in Schedule B and number eleven, of which nine have since been withdrawn.

Schedule B and the Attestation of Presence

Attestation under Schedule B may be made by a witness of standing, a sealed entry in a floor ledger, or the physical evidence of recent use. The last category has caused the most trouble. In Y-3127 a maintenance party reported a chair on Floor 411 still warm, and the warmth was entered as attestation; the post was accordingly held to be occupied for a further nine months, during which the floor received no correspondence and answered none. The Archive Reckoning subsequently recorded the warmth as an error of measurement rather than an error of staffing, a distinction the Accord does not make and has never been asked to.

Attestation by witness is preferred. The witness need not have seen the holder, only the holder's post in a condition consistent with holding. Clerks of the Document Distribution service have attested posts on floors they passed without stopping, and the practice is accepted. A witness may not attest their own post.

Conflict with the Tetra-Lateral Accord

Scholars disagree sharply over the Accord's relationship to the Tetra-Lateral Accord, whose schedules presuppose lateral measurement and therefore presuppose staffed transitways. The reading favoured in the Accord of Delineated Responsibility holds that Concordance 177 supplies the staffing definition that the Tetra-Lateral schedules silently assume, and that the two documents are complementary. The contrary reading, advanced most forcibly by Archivist-Ledger Kael in a marginal note of Y-3139, holds that the Tetra-Lateral Accord's silence on staffing is deliberate, and that Concordance 177 applies only to floors and not to the lateral stacks between them.

"The Accord governs posts. A transitway is not a post. It is a way. To staff a way is to misunderstand the word."

— Kael, marginal note to the staffing review of Y-3139

The dispute has not been resolved, though the Metrological Accord has been asked to rule twice and has twice declined, citing Concordance 188 and the press of other measurement.

Amendment of Y-3141

The most recent recension added Article 7, which provides that a post may be held in abeyance where its holder is posted elsewhere and the absence is documented. The amendment was intended to regularize the practice of clerks serving two floors, a practice common in the lower stacks and nowhere acknowledged in writing. It has instead produced a class of posts described in the returns as held, unfilled, and attested — occupied on paper by a holder occupied elsewhere, and thus staffed twice by one person.

The Provisional Acoustic Accord was invoked in Y-3143 to determine whether an echo of a clerk counted as a second holder under Article 7. The Office of Acoustic Integrity found that it did not, on the grounds that an echo is an effect and not a person, and the finding was entered without appeal.

Practical Consequences

The Accord's effects are felt chiefly in the staffing returns, which are compiled each quarter from the floor ledgers and checked against the manifests by clerks of the Department of Provenance. A floor that returns itself as staffed without attestation is queried; a floor that returns itself as unstaffed is queried twice. Floors returning neither are presumed staffed and left alone, which is the outcome most floors prefer.

Visitors to a post held under Article 7 are asked to knock twice before entering and to leave the door ajar on departure, so that the attestation of recent use may be preserved. The requirement is printed on the reverse of the standard floor notice and is widely ignored.