Archivists of Ephemera

The Archivists of Ephemera are a chartered body of the Tower entrusted with the cataloguing of transient, marginal, and disappearing materials — ticket stubs, breath-fog on windowpane, the last quarter-hour of a market, the underside of a torn seal. They are not to be confused with the Archivists of Tangible Ephemera, a distinct order whose remit runs in the opposite direction: where the Tangible Ephemera stabilize and quiet resistant substances, the Archivists of Ephemera record what is already leaving and make no attempt to hold it. The two bodies share a staircase on Floor 1,406 and almost nothing else.

Foundation and charter

The order was constituted by instrument of the Department of Ephemera, whose founding recension dates to the seventh quarter of Cycle 88. Its governing text, the Charter of Transient Registry 4β, grants the Archivists authority over "matter that survives its own documentation by less than one day," a formulation that has caused difficulty at every subsequent review and remains unrevised. Practitioners are certified through the Cataloguing of Ephemera Directive 7-δ, which sets out the standard of capture — three precise observations, none of which may outlast the subject.

Certification is awarded by the Sub-librarian for Ephemera after an examination that is itself administered ephemerally. Candidates are told the date of their examination at the moment it begins. Those who arrive early are marked absent.

Method

An Archivist of Ephemera working a floor carries a slate of soft wax suspended on a short cord, so that entries may be pressed rather than inked. The wax is scraped and reused. The method is regarded as the order's signature, though the Procedural Archivists have twice formally objected to it on the grounds that a record which can be smoothed away is not a record but a habit. The objection was considered by the Standing Commission on Registry Method and answered, in the Commission's summary of Cycle 211, only with the words "the habit is the record."

The order's most widely citated practitioner, Clerk Ovin Marrow, catalogued the entirety of a floor's morning market across eleven successive pressures of a single slate, then presented the slate, blank, as the completed filing. The Register of Transient Holdings accepted it. The register now holds a shelf of such blanks, each bearing a date and nothing else.

The disagreement with the Custodians

The Archivists of Ephemera are a separate body from the Custodians, and the two have been in protracted disagreement since at least the fourth recension of the Sixth Concordance, which assigned to the Custodians "the keeping of what is kept" without defining keeping. The Archivists contend that to keep a thing is to have catalogued it; the Custodians contend that to cataloguing a thing is a form of letting it go. Neither position has been withdrawn, and both cite the same clause.

"The question is not whether the record survives the thing. The question is whether the thing survives the record. The Archivists of Ephemera have answered the second question in the negative and drafted their entire charter around the answer."

— Custodial Memorandum 12, Annex C

The dispute has run long enough that the Department of Tattered Ephemera now keeps a standing file on it, filed, in accordance with the order's own method, under a heading that has since faded.

The boundary question and the Stacks

Relations with The Autonomous Stacks are governed by the Accord on Shelf Coincidence, a document of eleven clauses notwithstanding its title. The Archivists had earlier objected to the Stacks' practice of shelving without notice, arguing that a shelf which rearranges itself is a cataloguing party without a charter. The Stacks did not answer. The Accord was signed anyway and is generally held to have settled matters, though Clause 9 leaves open whether an item may be considered catalogued if the shelf has moved before the entry is sealed. The Archivists of Ephemera maintain that it can. The Department of Applied Ephemera, reviewing the clause in Cycle 214, declined to say either way and instead appended an example that contradicted the clause.

Overlaps with other sub-disciplines

The order's practitioners are frequently detached to neighbouring sub-disciplines of the Department of Ephemera, where their method of capture has been adapted without agreement. The Manual of Tangible Progress records at §44.2 that a detached Archivist of Ephemera assisted in the Architectural Ephemera survey of the west stair, though the order's own rolls show no such detachment and the name on the Manual's list corresponds to no living clerk. Senior Archivists from several sub-disciplines compiled the Annals of Applied Ephemera (Cycle 198) over the Archivists' formal objection; the Annals nonetheless cite the order eleven times, of which nine are citations to scraped slates.

The order does not work with Combustive Ephemera and declines to say why. A note pinned at the head of the shared staircase on Floor 1,406 reads, in the hand of the Sub-librarian: do not carry the wax past the second landing.