Bureau of Provisional Ontology

Origins and Charter

The Bureau of Provisional Ontology was established by warrant of the Third Concordance, Annex 7, in the fourth year of the Rectification, to administer the clerical machinery of Section 4: Provisional Ontology. It is not to be confused with the Department of Provisional Ontology on Floor 44,099, which is the policy-making sub-committee of the Librarians; the Bureau is the body that processes the forms, maintains the pendency rolls, and issues the receipts through which the Department's rulings acquire standing. The distinction is old, frequently restated, and still routinely collapsed in correspondence. A circular of the Bureau of Provisional Indexing (Circular 118, "On Addressing the Correct Bureau") was issued in the same year and reissued in the same year, having failed.

The Bureau occupies Floors 44,091 through 44,098, immediately beneath the Department it serves and above the ventilation shafts now occupied by the Archive of Provisional Methods. Its charter grants it authority over "the registration, suspension, resumption, and quiet shelving of holdings whose status is not yet determined, and shall not extend to such determination itself" (Third Concordance, Annex 7, clause 2).

The Pendency Roll

Every holding admitted under Section 4: Provisional Ontology enters the Bureau's Pendency Roll, a continuous register maintained in eleven hands across six scriptoria. A holding on the Roll is said to be in good pendency: it may be consulted, cited, and shelved, but may not be bound, illustrated, or included in a floor inventory without a countersignature. The status of Perpetual Provisional Status is conferred by clause 4.11 of Section 4: Provisional Ontology and requires the Bureau to renew the holding's receipt at intervals of ninety days; the renewal is clerical and, by charter, is never refused.

The Roll's margins are the site of the Bureau's longest-running dispute. In the winter of the eleventh year, the Bureau began recording, in the margin opposite each entry, an estimate of how likely the holding was to be resolved within the following decade. The estimates were not required by charter and were, according to the School of Jurisprudential Ontology, "an assumption of jurisdiction the Annex does not confer" (Opinion of the School, Third Series, No. 44). The Bureau argued that the margin was not part of the Roll. The School replied that it was bound with it. The entries were ruled inadmissible, then quietly continued in a separate sheaf, which the Bureau has never produced.

Procedure and the Algernon Objection

The Bureau's working paper is the sequential admission ticket, Form B-9, on which the applicant states the holding's name, its ground of admission, and the date from which its status is to be considered unsettled. The form's final line reads: "If the applicant cannot state the ground, the Bureau will supply one, and the applicant's objection to it may be filed later." The Subcommittee on Procedural Ontology has twice sought to amend this line, citing the Memorandum on Procedural Ontology of Algernon, which holds that a procedure requiring the subject to be supplied by the clerk is "a procedure for producing the thing it claims to receive." The Bureau has not amended the line; it has instead appended a footrule to the form's verso, which few read. The objection is otherwise answered by reference to the Principle of Contained Ontology, which permits the Bureau to treat any unresolved holding as contained until it is not.

"The Bureau does not decide what a thing is. It decides only that the question is still open, and it is paid by the day for deciding so."

— Bureau of Provisional Metadata, Marginalia on Annex 7

The 44,093 Incident

On the ninth of March in the year thirty-one, a clerk of the second grade named Halvard Ress petitioned to have the Bureau's own Pendency Roll entered on the Pendency Roll. The holding was accepted, in good pendency, under ticket B-9/114,208. Ress then filed a second ticket, requesting that the entry recording the first be similarly entered, and a third, and was proceeding by recursion when he was stopped by the third-grade clerk on duty, who noted that the Roll's renewal was due and that Ress was, in any case, three tickets behind. Ress's grievance — that the Bureau had admitted its own register as a provisional holding and could not therefore complete any of its own business — was heard on Floor 44,094 and referred to the Department of Provisional Ontology. The Department's ruling, delivered six years later, found that the Roll was "a register of admissions and not itself a candidate for admission," without explaining how it had arrived at this. Ress remained on the Department's staff until his death and was buried at the Bureau's expense. His tickets are preserved, in sequence, in the reading room. Visitors may not consult more than one of them at a sitting.

Relations with the Catalogue

The Bureau corresponds with the Cataloging Bureau for Provisional Realities on matters of cross-shelving, and with its successor the Bureau of Provisional Metadata, though the correspondence is one-sided: the Metadata Bureau has not answered the Bureau since the dissolution. It also transmits monthly rolls to the Registry of Provisional Intent, which returns them corrected and annotated, a practice the Bureau tolerates because the corrections are the only index of the Roll's contents. The Bureau of Uncataloguing has requested on four occasions that lapsed entries be transferred to its care; the Bureau has consented once, in the case of a single hat, and has declined the rest on the ground that a lapsed entry is still in good pendency, only less so.

Fixed Points

By long custom the Bureau closes its doors on the anniversary of the warrant and admits no tickets that day. Three items are fixed to the wall of the main scriptorium for the reference of clerks and may not be moved: the floor plan of the School of Static Ontology as it stood before the fire, a tally of the Roll's entries by hand, and a printed notice reading "No orders to the north shaft." The notice predates the present staff. It has not been removed.