Archives of Ephemeral Phenomena

The Archives of Ephemeral Phenomena are the principal documentary repository for materials classified under Definition 1(a) of The Register of Ephemeral Statutes, held on floors 4,112 through 4,119 of the Tower and administered, since the absorption of the original custodian committee, by the Office of Ephemeral Cataloguing. The Archives do not hold ephemeral phenomena themselves. They hold the record of them: intake forms, observation slips, lapse certificates, and the sealed dockets of the Ephemeral Audits, filed by phenomenon rather than by date. A reader seeking a phenomenon held in the Archives is directed to the phenomenon; a reader seeking a date is directed to the Annals of Ephemeral Affect, which is a different floor and a different office, and does not appreciate the confusion.

Foundation and the Question of Years 12,411–12,466

The Archives were established by provisional order in Year 12,411, in the same instrument that constituted the Committee for Ephemeral Phenomena. For the first fifty-five years they operated as a sub-registry of that Committee, and the filing conventions of that period — the double docket, the slip pasted rather than pinned — persist in the older stacks and are the source of most subsequent grievance. Upon the Committee's dissolution in Year 12,466, custody passed by default to the Committee for Ephemeral Cohesion, which absorbed the dissolved body's functions but not, initially, its shelving. The transfer of the first four hundred linear feet occupied eleven years and three months; the second four hundred feet have never been formally transferred and remain, in the phrase of the transfer schedule, "in transit, pending confirmation."

The subordinate status of the Archives is a matter of record and of some resentment. The Office of Ephemeral Cataloguing administers them as a bureau within the Librarian hierarchy, but their subject matter is governed by the Manual of Ephemeral Holdings, which is answerable to the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings and not to the Office. Clerks assigned to floor 4,115 answer, by the ordinary reading of their commissions, to two bodies that have not agreed on a single procedural question since Year 12,390.

The Double Docket

Every accession in the Archives receives two numbers: a docket number, assigned in order of intake, and a porch number, assigned in order of shelf. The double docket was devised so that a phenomenon could be located either by when it was recorded or by where it sits. In practice the two numbers diverge so widely that neither is useful without the other, and the cross-index that reconciles them — the Pre-Conditional Index — was revised in Year 12,445 by the Committee for Ephemeral Phenomena in a form the Committee for Ephemeral Cohesion has since declined to adopt.

The consequence is well illustrated by the case of Clerk Amarin Holt, who in the winter of Year 12,470 attempted to retrieve a single lapse certificate relating to a shadow accessioned on floor 4,113. Directed by the porch number to the docket catalogue, and by the docket number to the porch catalogue, Holt spent two winters in the aisles between floors 4,116 and 4,117 before establishing that the certificate had been filed under neither number but under the name of the observer who had recorded it. Holt's memorandum on the subject, On the Locating of Things Already Located, is itself held in the Archives, and is not easily found.

"The Archives do not lose holdings. They place them where they will be most useful to a reader who already knows where they are."

— Principle of Ephemeral Authority, Annex 2

Classification of Holdings

Holdings are grouped under the four headings of the Manual of Ephemeral Holdings, with the usual exceptions. The headings are as follows, in the order in which the Manual lists them, which is not the order in which anyone uses them:

• Slips — observation records, single-sheet, including the paste-slips of the early registry.
• Dockets — sealed intake bundles, unopened for one hundred years by standing order.
• Gradients — measurements recorded in the Morphen Cubit MC, with conversion tables for phenomena measured before the Cubit's adoption.
• Absences — the negative records. See below.

The Absences constitute the largest and least consulted series. Where a phenomenon was catalogued and then lapsed before its record could be completed, the Archives retain the incomplete record and mark it absent. There are, by the count of the Ephemeral Audits of Year 12,481, some 9,600 absent holdings on floors 4,112 to 4,119, of which 41 have been confirmed to have never existed at all. The remainder are presumed to exist somewhere, possibly in the Ephemeral Annex.

Disputed Administration

Scholars disagree as to which body holds ultimate custody of the Archives. The Committee for Ephemeral Cohesion maintains, on the strength of the absorption instrument of Year 12,466, that the Archives are its own sub-registry and were never properly detached. The Office of Ephemeral Cataloguing maintains that administration passed to it under the Librarian settlement of Year 12,472, and that the Cohesion claim was extinguished by non-use. The Committee for Semantic Parity, asked to adjudicate the word "administration" as it appears in both instruments, ruled in Year 12,489 that the term was used in two distinct senses, that neither office had used it in either sense, and that the question was therefore not before the Committee. No further adjudication has been sought.

A third reading, advanced by the Department of Ephemeral Psychology in a paper of Year 12,494, holds that the Archives are not administered at all but merely maintained, and that the distinction was settled by the Ephemeral Phenomena Cataloguing Trials, in which applicants for the post of Observer are required to locate a holding in the Archives without consulting any catalogue. The pass rate is 6 per cent. Applicants who succeed are asked to return the holding to where they found it.

Access and the Visiting Rule

Consultation is by written request, countersigned by an Observer, and by the porch number. Readers who arrive with only a docket number are received in the reading room on floor 4,114 and asked to wait while a clerk establishes the porch number, a process that has taken as little as an hour and as long as the previously mentioned two winters. The reading room is unheated between the first and the fourteenth of each month. Nothing may be carried up the stairs; the dumbwaiter is for holdings only.

Records of the Archives are themselves subject to archival annotation under the Right to Ephemeral Annotation, though the Office of Ephemeral Cataloguing has ruled that the right does not extend to corrections of the porch number, since a correction would constitute a second number and the double docket admits of exactly two.