Archival Curation

Archival Curation is the branch of Tower practice concerned with the maintenance, ordering, and eventual conclusion of holdings once they have passed out of active use. It is distinguished from its sibling disciplines by an insistence that a record, having been made, must be kept in a manner legible to a reader who has not yet been born and whose questions cannot be anticipated. The discipline is governed principally by Concordance 12, which sets out the transition of holdings from active curation into immutable archival conclusion, and administered in its day-to-day particulars by the Office of Precedent Curation and the Office of the Archivist-Librarian in joint session where jurisdiction is contested, which is often.

Archival Curation is not to be confused with Negation as Curation, though the two are related and, in the view of the School of Predictive Curation, not related enough. Where negation removes a holding from the catalogue in order that it be curated, archival curation retains the holding and curates it in place. The distinction is legible in the shelving alone.

Scope and method

The discipline proceeds by three operations, applied in an order that has been disputed since the eleventh recension. Holdings are first stabilised — their folios separated, their edges dated, their Curation Logs reconciled against the floor registers. They are then interleaved, a procedure carried out according to the customs of the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page, in which blank leaves are inserted at intervals so that future annotation need not be written in the margins of the original. Finally they are concluded, a term of art under Concordance 12 meaning that the holding is sealed to amendment but remains open to consultation.

Conclusion is not permanent. A concluded holding may be reopened by petition to the Office of the Archivist-Librarian, provided the petitioner can show that a subsequent Concordance has altered the grounds of conclusion. Between the years 4021 and 4038, of one hundred and nine such petitions, six were granted; two of the six were later found to have been granted to the same holding twice, and the duplicate conclusion was left in place as a cautionary example.

"Nothing concluded shall be reopened save upon a ground that did not exist at conclusion, and no ground shall be deemed not to have existed merely because no one thought of it."

— Concordance 12, clause 9

The Vault question

A persistent difficulty in Archival Curation concerns holdings that have been negated under the doctrine of Negation as Curation and thereafter assigned, by Curation Standard 45, to The Vault of Negated Events. Such holdings are by definition no longer in the archive, yet the Vault is itself an archive, and its holdings require curation. The result is a body of material that is curated twice, once in negation and once in retention, and whose cataloguers disagree about which record is authoritative.

The Seventh Concordance, Annex 7B, addressed the adjacent case of auditory holdings, assigning procedures for curation within auditory governance zones under the oversight of the Silent Choirs. Whether Annex 7B extends by analogy to the Vault has been argued at length. The School of Particulars holds that it does not, on the ground that sound and silence are not the same kind of absence; the Nominalist Archives Directorate holds that they are, on the ground that neither is a thing.

The Torvin amalgamation

The most cited failure of archival curation is the amalgamation of the Torvin folios. In the winter of 3977, a clerk of the second gallery — identified in the incident register only by the cipher T-4 — concluded two separate holdings under the mistaken impression that they described a single subject. The error was not detected for fourteen years, during which time every citation of either holding pointed to a composite that existed in no floor's register.

On discovery, the Office of Precedent Curation declined to reverse the amalgamation, reasoning that fourteen years of citation had made the composite the more cited object. The original folios were retained as an appendix to their own merged record. T-4 was reassigned to the Galleries of Attenuated Light and is recorded as having requested the transfer.

Disputes with predictive curation

Archival Curation locates its authority in the record as made. The School of Predictive Curation locates its authority in the record as it will necessarily have been made, and maintains that a holding concluded without reference to its Predictive Modelling is concluded prematurely. The School assigns a grade to each Asymmetry Index arising from this disagreement, and the Directorate of Predictive Annotation relies on those grades in preparing its annotations of concluded holdings.

The tension is procedural rather than doctrinal. Archival curators do not deny that a holding will be read differently later; they deny that later reading obliges the present catalogue to guess. As one recension of the Office's guidance puts it, in a formulation much quoted and never sourced to a named author: "We shelve for the reader who arrives; we do not shelve for the reader who does not."

Practical notes

Curation is carried out on the floor where the holding rests, never in transit between floors, a rule introduced after the Chamber of Echoing Precedents lost eleven folios to a stairwell in 3844. Instruments are not carried above the ninth gallery. Cataloguers working the night registers must sign the Rite of Final Negation only after the interleaving is complete, and not before, as the Rite removes the folio from the active count and the count cannot be restored without a petition.

The Murmuring Consensus is consulted where a holding's floor assignment is ambiguous, though its replies are treated as advisory. An inventory of a typical curation station, as recorded on the fourth gallery in 4002, runs as follows:

• one interleaving knife, unsharpened
• two register seals, one broken
• a dated slip for each folio, none of them current
• the floor's standing Concordance, unopened

Stations are inspected twice yearly. Stations found with a current dated slip are noted, and the note is filed.