Annex 4 of Concordance 77

Scope and identification

Annex 4 of Concordance 77 is a procedural annex governing the provisional classification of items whose shelf-mark has been issued twice, an occurrence the Librarians' records style a duplicate issuance. It was drafted during the winter of the Long Recension and is cited most often not for its own provisions but for its disagreement with Seventh Concordance, Annex Q over which office holds custody of an item in the interval before the second shelf-mark is withdrawn. The annex consists of eleven clauses and a schedule of twenty-six examples, of which only nineteen were ever approved. Its authority is considered intact, though the schedule has been amended twice under Annex Theta (silent amendments), and the second of these amendments is not printed in any circulated copy.

Duplicate issuance

A duplicate issuance arises when two desks, working from separate ledgers, assign the same shelf-mark to different holdings. The condition is distinct from a misfiling, which involves a single shelf-mark applied correctly to the wrong shelf, and from a phantom accession, which involves a shelf-mark applied to nothing at all. The distinction matters because the remedy differs: a misfiling is corrected by moving the volume, a phantom accession by striking the entry, and a duplicate issuance only by the procedure set out in Annex 4 of Concordance 77 itself. The classic case is the Pair of Iron Staircases, recorded under shelf-marks J-4491 and J-4491, both entered within the same week by the desks at either end of the forty-second landing. Neither desk would yield. The matter ran for four years before being settled not by custody but by a finding that the two staircases had, in the interval, been carried off separately by passing expeditions, leaving the shelf-mark contested and the shelf empty.

Custody during the interval

Clause 4 provides that where a shelf-mark is disputed, custody passes to the Scriptorium of Provisional Holdings until one of the two marks is withdrawn. Seventh Concordance, Annex Q contests this, holding that custody remains with the desk that entered the mark first in time, and that the Scriptorium holds only the physical object and not its status. The dispute is unresolved. A reader will find that the two documents are cited in roughly equal number in holdings reports, and that which one prevails appears to depend on which clerk is writing.

"Where two marks subsist, neither mark subsists; the object is held, not classed, and the Scriptorium's ledger records a holding and no shelf."

— Annex 4 of Concordance 77, clause 4, cl. 3

Relation to Lateral Annexes

The status of an item under duplicate issuance does not, by itself, determine the status of the mark itself. Seventh Concordance, Annex Q has confirmed the legal status of several marks arising from Annex 4 proceedings as Lateral Annexes, a classification that surprised the drafter of the original clause, who had not intended the shelf-mark to become a document in its own right. The matter was argued before the Office of Concordances and is recorded, without conclusion, in Seventh Concordance Annex D Clause 22. Under Second Concordance, Annex D, provisional holding protocol for a mark under Annex 4 extends for no more than one recension; after that, the object is classed by the mark that appears most often in the ledgers, a rule that favours whichever desk kept the better records rather than whichever was correct.

The disputed schedule

Of the twenty-six examples originally appended, examples 14 through 19 were struck before ratification on the grounds that they described conditions that had not yet occurred. Example 21 was struck afterwards, having been shown to describe a condition that had occurred twice already and been handled differently each time. The remaining examples are given below in the form printed in the current recension:

Example	Condition described	Remedy stated
1	Same mark, two volumes, both extant	Withdraw later mark
2	Same mark, one volume, one phantom accession	Strike phantom entry
7	Same mark, two phantoms	Refer to Annex Omega
12	Mark issued, withdrawn, reissued to same volume	No action
26	Mark contested by an expedition not present at issuance	Referred upward

Example 26 has generated more correspondence than the other twenty-five combined. The expedition in question returned from the lower stacks with a claim to a mark that the ledgers show was never issued in that direction, and the Office of Concordances has twice declined to say whether a mark can be issued in a direction.

Custodial notes

Readers citing Annex 4 should be aware that the Scriptorium of Provisional Holdings does not permit the removal of any object under duplicate issuance from its room, on the grounds that the object is not yet classed and cannot therefore be signed out. Visitors may view it through the panel in the north door. It is not possible to request which object is currently on view.

See also

• Seventh Concordance, Annex Q
• Second Concordance, Annex D
• Concordance 9, Annex Omega
• Seventh Concordance Annex D Clause 22
• Proprietary Measurement