Catalogical Tribunal

The Catalogical Tribunal is the collective designation for the standing and ad hoc bodies that hear disputes arising from the act of cataloguing itself — as distinct from disputes about what has been catalogued. The distinction is maintained with some ferocity. A question of whether a floor exists belongs to the Department of Ontic Verification; a question of whether it was entered correctly belongs to the Catalogical Tribunal. Where a dispute is both, the Tribunal hears it first and the Department reviews the finding afterward, an arrangement set out in Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, and resented by both bodies continuously since 11,388.

The Tribunal does not sit in a single chamber. Its business is distributed across the Librarians' Tribunal, the Sub-Basement Tribunal, the Deaccessioning Tribunal, and the Cataloguing Tribunal of Annals 12,442, each of which holds a portion of the Catalogical Tribunal's inherited writ. Practitioners speak of "approaching the Catalogical Tribunal" in the way one speaks of approaching a building with four unrelated front doors.

Origin and the Question of the Register

The Tribunal's founding instrument is Ninth Concordance, Clause 2, which establishes that "the manner of an entry may be challenged separately from the entry," and that such challenges shall be heard by "the Tribunal of the Catalogue, however constituted." The phrase however constituted has occupied the archive for the better part of a millennium. Eleventh Concordance, Clause 2, drafted after the first great dispute over the phrase, holds that the Tribunal is a single body that convenes in panels. Fourteenth Concordance, Annex 3, holds that the Tribunal is a standing bench whose panels are merely its sittings. The two clauses have never been reconciled, and the reconciliation is not sought: a clerk of the Central Scriptorium observed in a marginal note of 11,901 that "the question is asked chiefly by parties who have already lost before one or the other."

In practice the Southern Spiral bench (Floors 4,118 through 4,143) operates as though the Eleventh governs, and the Annals bench operates as though the Fourteenth does. A finding of one is not binding on the other. The Committee for Catalogical Coherence has declined to settle the matter on four occasions, most recently in a ruling of 12,004 which held that the Committee "lacks the appetite" — a phrase later struck from the record and then restored.

Jurisdiction

The Tribunal's competence extends to errors of placement, errors of description, errors of attribution, errors of sequence, and the class of errors known as silent amendments, in which an entry is altered without any note of alteration. Silent amendments are the Tribunal's heaviest business. They are also the hardest to prove, since the amended entry is by definition indistinguishable from an entry that was always so.

Disputes over Catalogical Velocity (Cv) fall to the Tribunal whenever the velocity in question concerns the rate at which an entry was made rather than the rate at which a floor changes; the latter belongs to the Department. Disputes over Catalogical Stability are heard by the Tribunal only where stability is pleaded as a defence, which it frequently is, and which the Tribunal has held since 11,764 to be a defence available to the entry and not to the clerk who made it.

Parties are expected to bring their own citations. A party arriving without the relevant Concordance is given until the next bell to produce it and is not given a second bell. This rule was introduced after the hearing of 11,455, at which a claimant read aloud from a document he declined to hand up, and continued reading for six hours.

The Grievance of Clerk Ondrej Vask

The most cited private grievance in the Tribunal's history is that of Ondrej Vask, a second-class entry clerk attached to the Annals bench in the winter of 11,892. Vask had entered a floor twice — once under its number, once under a name he had inferred from a delivery label — and was summoned to answer for the duplication. At his hearing he produced the delivery label, and the bench ruled that the label "was not an instrument of the Tower and could not be pleaded." Vask requested that the ruling be recorded as a finding. The bench declined. He requested that his request be recorded. The bench declined that also.

Vask then petitioned the Committee for Catalogical Coherence for appellate review, which was granted in form and denied in substance by a one-line instrument reading "the record is adequate." His subsequent submission, the Vask Memorial, is held in the Central Scriptorium under seal and may be consulted with a Librarian present. It is ninety pages long. The first eighty-nine concern the label. The ninetieth reads, in full: "The record is adequate. I have read it."

"No party shall be heard to complain of a record that the party has not read in its entirety, and no party shall be given the entirety where the entirety exceeds nine pages, except upon written application, which shall be refused."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, as amended by the Instrument of 11,880

Procedure and the Two Bells

A hearing opens with the reading of the entry under challenge, which is read twice: once as it stands, once as the challenger contends it should stand. The bench then asks whether the difference between the two readings is material. If the answer is no, the entry stands and the challenger pays the cost of the two readings. If the answer is yes, the matter proceeds to Evidence Reauthentication, conducted under the authority of the Librarians' Tribunal, and the entry is suspended in the interim. Suspended entries are kept in the Axis of Omissions and may not be cited in argument until restored — a rule that has generated more secondary disputes than any other in the Tribunal's practice, since a party's best authority is often the very entry under challenge.

The Tribunal's procedural ledger, Concerning Correspondents, records that of the 2,304 matters opened in the cycle of 12,100, some 1,140 were resolved by the parties agreeing that the difference was not material, 610 were resolved by the challenger failing to appear, and 31 were resolved on the merits. The remaining 523 were carried into the following cycle, where 14 of them were resolved on the merits.

Doctrinal Conflict

The Tribunal's relation to Catalogical Coherence is contested. Sixth Concordance, Annex 6, holds that a finding of the Tribunal is coherent by definition, coherence being a property of the finding rather than of the entry. Tenth Concordance, Clause 5, holds the reverse: that a finding is coherent only if the entry it produces is coherent, and that an incoherent entry renders the finding void. Under the Sixth, the Tribunal cannot err. Under the Tenth, it can err only in ways that show up later, in the catalogue, where they are attributed to the entry and not the bench.

The Provisional Tribunal on Ideological Contamination has twice declined to take up the question, on the ground that Meta-Catalogical Conflict is outside its remit. The Librarians' Tribunal has taken it up and referred it onward to the Panel of Adjudication, where it has rested since 12,006. The Catalogical Refusal Theory is sometimes pleaded before the Tribunal as a defence to materiality; it has never succeeded, but a version of it succeeded once, in 11,977, before a bench whose composition is not recorded.