Conditional Certification

The Conditional Certification is the ordinary instrument by which the Vault of Conditional Authority permits a person, office, or stairwell to come into contact with a holding that is not yet settled enough to be touched without permission. It is not a licence to hold the thing; it is a licence to be in the same room as the holding while someone else decides. Certifications are issued in three grades — Provisional, Standing, and Withdrawn Pending Review — of which only the first two have ever been observed in the field. The third exists because of Auditor-Subscribe Wren Halloway, and is discussed below.

Origin and repeal

Conditional Certification entered the record with the Ordinance of Conditional Closure OCC-8812, which established the Division of Conditional Permissions and, in the same instrument, required that nothing be certified conditionally until the manner of certification had been settled. The two provisions were clauses 6 and 41, separated by eleven pages of definitions, and were read together for sixty-three years as an instruction to wait. Under this reading the Tower accumulated a backlog of affairs that were neither permitted nor forbidden, and did not much mind.

Clause 41 was repealed in 1104 by the Division of Conditional Permissions on the reasoning that the Ordinance had plainly intended certification to occur. The repeal does not survive in full. What survives is a marginal annotation in the working copy, in a hand identified in 1189 as that of Clerk-Adjunct Marrow Pell, which reads: "Make it conditional instead, then it does not matter which way you read it."

"Where an instrument cannot be settled, it shall be certified anyway, and the certification shall be its own instruction to the contrary."

— Division of Conditional Permissions, working copy of OCC-8812, annotation to clause 41

This annotation has been cited in support of the practice for nine hundred years and was formally adopted as doctrine by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, without acknowledgement. Pell's estate has filed twice and withdrawn twice.

Grades and the granting of them

A Provisional grade is the familiar entry to the ladder and closely resembles the Librarian-Taxonomist, Provisional Grade held by most readers at the Spiral Desks; the two are frequently confused and the certification is the narrower, since it names a single holding rather than a class of holdings. A Standing grade names no holding at all and instead permits the certified party to remain in contact with unspecified unsettled material for as long as the material remains unsettled — a permission so broad it has been issued only eleven times, and eight of those issue Certificates were later found to have been countersigned in error.

The grade is not marked on the certificate. It is carried in the Certification Block, a stamped panel of the reader's own copy that the reader is required to keep face down until asked. Certification Block practice is governed by the Manual of Conditional Operation, which gives no instruction as to who may ask, and the resulting habit — of asking, and being asked, and declining — has become the ordinary courtesy of the upper reading rooms.

Every certification is attested separately by a Modal Coherence Attestation, a short form declaring that the holding certified is the same holding it was last time. Where the two documents disagree, the Attestation governs. Where the Attestation is missing, the certification stands but cannot be shown to anyone.

Withdrawal, and the grievance of Wren Halloway

In the winter of 1246, Auditor-Subscribe Wren Halloway was granted a Standing grade over a collection of maps in the northwest gallery of Floor 1138. Halloway read them for nine days and then applied to withdraw. The Vault advised that withdrawal of a Standing grade was not provided for, and issued a second Standing grade alongside the first. Halloway applied again. The Vault issued a third. By the spring of 1247 Halloway held fourteen.

The dispute was referred to the Directorate of Conditional Pathway Maintenance, which declined jurisdiction on the ground that a certification is not a pathway. It was then referred to the Vault, which was the office complained of, and which upheld itself. Halloway's grievance, filed as an appeal to the Third Concordance, was answered by the creation of the third grade, Withdrawn Pending Review, under which a certification may be surrendered provided the surrender is itself certified. No such surrender has been completed. The Nine-Day Reading of Floor 1138 remains uncatalogued, since the holdings in that gallery are still certified and cannot be described.

Contradiction in the Concordances

Scholarly opinion divides on whether a Conditional Certification has ever conferred permission rather than merely recording that permission was not refused. The Lexicon of Conditional Phrases defines certification as "the act of rendering conditional," which supports the stronger reading, and the Manual of Conditional Operation proceeds on the weaker, treating the certificate as evidence only. Each cites the other.

The Seventh Concordance holds, at clause 12, that an expired conditional certification remains in force until it is listed as expired in the register, and the Vault of Conditional Authority is charged under Concordance OCC-1204 with maintaining that register. The Ninth Concordance holds, at clause 12, that no certification may outlive the body that issued it, a provision which has never been tested and which the Vault has asked to have annexed rather than read.

Readers attempting to resolve the matter are advised that the Treatise on Conditional Geographies addresses the question at length and answers it differently in its first and third recensions. The third recension is the shorter.

Inventory

Items presently held by the Certification Desk on Floor 1138:

• Eleven blank certificates, Provisional, stamped and unwitnessed.
• One Standing certificate, face down.
• The fourteen Halloway certifications, in a box, unopened since 1247.
• A rubber stamp bearing the word UNSETTLED, worn at the second letter.
• One chair, requisitioned 1198, not returned.

Conditional certifications should not be confused with Certification Claims, which are filed against them, nor with the process of Conditional Re-stabilization, which is what happens when the certified holding turns out to have been a Conditional Existence all along. Certificates are stored face down. Certificates found face up are to be turned over without reading and reported to the Division of Conditional Permissions, which keeps no record of the reports.