Autonomous Crossreferencing

Definition and scope

Autonomous Crossreferencing is the practice by which a catalogue entry establishes, maintains, or amends its own relations to other entries without submission of a Preliminary Folio to a reviewing clerk. It is recognised as a distinct discipline within The Autonomous Stacks, where it accounts for the majority of relation-work logged annually. The practice is not older than the Ruling on Autonomous Agency, though its proponents have repeatedly argued that it is, on the grounds that a cross-reference is not an act of authorship but of pointing.

The distinction matters materially. Under the Concordance of Semi-Autonomous Districts, an entry that points is administrative; an entry that composes is editorial. Autonomous Crossreferencing occupies the entire space between these, and has never been comfortably settled within it.

Historical development

The earliest surviving record of systematic Autonomous Crossreferencing is an annotation on folio 114 of the Register of Autonomous Silhouettes, in which an unattributed hand added forty-one directional marks in a single sitting. The marks were accurate. Their accuracy was, for eleven years, treated as an administrative error, since no clerk had been assigned to folio 114 in that period and none admitted to visiting it.

The practice formalised during the tenure of the Proctorate over Floor 1,337, when cross-reference density became a measurable quantity. Proctorate auditors established that the average entry on Floor 1,337, The Autonomous Stacks carried 12.4 outbound relations, while entries in neighbouring zones carried 3.1. The gap was attributed variously to superior indexing, to accretionary pocket contamination, and to a clerical fashion for over-linking that swept the lower stacks in a single winter and left no documentation.

By the time of the Ruling on Autonomous Agency, Autonomous Crossreferencing had acquired enough standing to be named as a disputed boundary in the proceedings that produced it. The custodians of Floor 1,337 argued that a cross-reference generated autonomously was an act of an Autonomous Scribal Golem and therefore fell under the Ruling's protections. The opposing office maintained that it was an act of the entry itself, which is not a person, not a golem, and not entitled to anything.

Relation to scouting

An Autonomous Library Scout detects potential ephemeral instances and initiates the inventory process by submitting a Preliminary Folio. Autonomous Crossreferencing begins where that process ends. Once an instance has been inventoried, the Scout's work is complete; the entry, if it is hosted within The Autonomous Stacks, may thereafter establish its own relations to neighbouring entries at will.

In practice this means that much of what a reader takes to be careful cataloguing was performed by no one in particular. The Crystalline Polyhedron of Autonomous Sorrow, deployed as a surveyor unit across three spiral quadrants, is frequently cited as evidence that autonomous relation-work produces better results than manual. It is also cited, with equal frequency, as evidence that the polyhedron was never asked to be accurate and cannot be said to have been.

Disputed questions

The principal disagreement concerns direction. One school holds that an Autonomous Crossreference may only point outward — from an entry to entries already catalogued — and that to point inward, inviting an existing entry to acknowledge a new relation, is an act of revision requiring a clerk. The opposing school, associated with the Guild of Unwritten Precedents, holds that direction is not a property of cross-references at all and that the entire distinction was imported from a misreading of an annex.

The Concordances do not settle this. The Fourth Concordance describes cross-references as "relations mutually entered into"; the Ninth describes them as "marks placed by one party upon another's record." Both are cited regularly; neither has been amended to accommodate the other.

A secondary dispute concerns whether an Autonomous Crossreference can be wrong. The Housing Syndicate maintains, in connection with tenancy records, that a relation either resolves or does not, and that a relation which resolves to an entry that has since been withdrawn is a maintenance problem rather than an error. The Oneirologists maintain that such relations resolve perfectly well, and to a different place than intended.

Current practice

Autonomous Crossreferencing is now standard within The Autonomous Stacks and prohibited outright within the Perpetual Creep boundaries, where relation-work is confided to the Courier-Sphere under the terms of a settlement older than any Concordance on the subject. Between these poles lies most of the Tower's vertical extent, where the practice is permitted, unmeasured, and regarded with the particular wariness that administrators reserve for work that is being done correctly by means they did not authorise.

Visitors to Floor 1,337 are reminded that relations recorded during a reading are not carried away with them, and that annotating a cross-reference by hand voids it.

"A cross-reference that asks permission has already stopped being a cross-reference and become a request."

— Guild of Unwritten Precedents, Position Paper 6