Cataloguing Standards

Cataloguing Standards are the codified administrative principles and protocols governing the descriptive documentation, classificatory assignment, and spatial registration of all entities archived within The Tower. Promulgated by the Archivist Guild and overseen in practice by the Curatorium of Verification, these standards provide the foundational taxonomy that renders the archive navigable, ensuring that a subject catalogued on one floor can be reliably cross-referenced with its related subjects on another, irrespective of their ontological status.

Foundational Principles

The philosophical underpinning of the Cataloguing Standards is the Doctrine of Documentary Realism, which holds that an entity's reality within the Tower is constituted solely by its properly formatted catalogue entry. The Standards are subdivided into three Core Codices:

Codex Descriptivus: Governs the mandatory fields for each entry, including Provisional Designation, Ontological Class (e.g., Paradoxical, Conditional, Apocryphal), Primary Floor of Residence, and a minimum of three Cross-References.
Codex Classificatorius: Details the nested taxonomic system, from Macro-Class (e.g., "Suspended Animates," "Recursive Geometries") down to Specific Epithet. Disputes over classification are deferred to the ad hoc Taxonomic Arbitration Panel.
Codex Locatorium: Dictates the rules for spatial assignment and the maintenance of the Master Floor Index, which maps catalogue numbers to physical (or non-physical) locations. This codex works in concert with the protocols of the Bureau of Cartographic Standards.

All three Codices are subject to amendment by Concordance 7 (On Archival Integrity), though amendments frequently introduce exceptions that are themselves catalogued in the Index of Non-Absolute Standards.

Implementation and the Verification Process

Before a new entry is granted a permanent catalogue number (e.g., CPT-4492-δ), it must survive the Verification Process administered by the Curatorium. This involves a multi-stage audit:

Formal Consistency Check: Ensures the entry complies with the formatting rules of Codex Descriptivus.
Ontological Plausibility Review: Assesses whether the entity's described properties are internally consistent, even if physically impossible. An entity that is "simultaneously ceramic and gaseous" may pass, while one that is "definitively numbered but also unnumbered" will be rejected for logical contradiction.
Cross-Reference Validation: Verifies that the proffered cross-references are to existing, active catalogue entries. Creating a reference to a non-existent entry is a Class 3 Infraction, punishable by temporary suspension of catalogue-creation privileges.

Upon successful verification, the entry is inscribed on a vellum shard, assigned its number, and its metadata is added to the Central Catalogue, a physical apparatus of interlinked brass rods and sliding panels occupying the entirety of Floor 17 (The Index)

The Problem of Meta-Cataloguing

A persistent scholarly dispute, known as the Hume-Schrift Controversy, centers on the cataloguing status of the Standards themselves. The Hume Position, as articulated in Annex Δ of Concordance 7, argues that the Cataloguing Standards are procedural, not substantive, and therefore belong in the administrative annexes, not the main catalogue. The Schrift School counters that the Standards demonstrably affect the behavior and classification of archived entities (e.g., an entity may evolve to better fit its taxonomic slot) and thus must be catalogued as a "Conditional Meta-Entity" with its own entry. This debate has led to the anomalous, provisional double-listing of the Standards under both CPT-0001-A (Administrative) and PXX-Ω (Paradoxical).

Interactions with Other Regulatory Bodies

The Cataloguing Standards do not exist in isolation. Their application is frequently modified by edicts from other Tower authorities:

Cultivar Standards: Dictate specific sub-classifications and descriptive terminology for botanical or fungal entities, such as lumen-moss. A cataloguer must use the approved Cultivar nomenclature, even if a specimen displays divergent characteristics.
Office of Chronometric Standards: Requires that any entity with a temporal component (e.g., "The Yesterday That Repeats") must have its temporal parameters notated using officially sanctioned Temporal Gauges, a process that often delays final cataloguing for decades.
Reality Audit: This periodic review may flag a catalogued entity for "descriptive drift" or "cross-reference decay," mandating a recataloguing procedure that must adhere to the Standards in their current, amended form, not the form under which the entity was originally entered.

Notable Deviations and the Grace of Archivists

The Index of Non-Absolute Standards officially recognizes several hundred permissible deviations. Common examples include the "Möbius Exception" for entities whose inside and outside are indistinguishable (permitting a single cross-reference to serve dual roles) and the "Librarian's Prerogative," which allows a Senior Archivist to expedite the cataloguing of an unstable entity by temporarily suspending the Plausibility Review, provided a full audit is scheduled within one fiscal quarter. The ultimate, unwritten standard is utility: an entry is deemed "correct" if it allows a researcher to reliably find the entity again. As such, the Cataloguing Standards are less a rigid framework and more a living, contested language through which the Tower describes itself to itself.