Curation Logs

Curation Logs are the running, hand-entered records by which the Librarians attest that a holding was examined, described, and returned to its shelf in the condition in which it was found. They are the oldest continuous series in the Tower, predating the Concordance system by an interval the archivists of the Seventh Helical Gallery place at "not less than four hundred years and not more than the visitor's patience" (Lys of the Seventh Helical Gallery, Preliminary Note on Series Continuity, undated). Every floor maintains its own logs; no floor acknowledges the logs of another except in dispute.

Form and Composition

A Curation Log entry records, in fixed order: the floor number, the date of examination, the designation of the item, a brief description of its condition, and the initials of the logging archivist. Entries are made in iron-gall ink on laid paper of a standard weight specified in Manual of Structural Documentation, Schedule 2. Corrections are struck through, never erased, and initialled in the margin. Marginal notes concerning the weather are permitted but are not counted toward the entry and are not, strictly speaking, part of the record — a distinction that has settled several disputes and started more.

The logs are bound in quires of forty leaves and shelved spine-out, contrary to the general practice of the Tower. A note pinned inside the door of the Archive of Extraction Logs explains that spine-out binding allows a clerk to read the date-stamp without removing the volume; the note is unsigned and has been there long enough to be cited as authority.

The Doctrine of Continuous Attestation

Curation Logs are held to constitute what the Fourth Concordance calls continuous attestation: the claim that an item existed, in a stated condition, on a stated day, asserted by a named officer. Continuous attestation is not evidence of provenance, ownership, or meaning, and the logs are frequently cited precisely because they decline to supply any of the three.

"The log does not say what a thing is. It says that someone looked at it, and when, and that the someone has a name."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, gloss on continuous attestation

This restraint has made the logs indispensable to the School of Predictive Curation, which mines them for the modelling protocols underlying Predictive Certainties. The Directorate of Predictive Annotation draws its training series almost entirely from Curation Logs of floors 100–400, where the entries are densest. The School of Particulars objects that a log entry is a particular and cannot be aggregated without ceasing to be one; the objection is recorded, in the usual way, in the log.

The Blank Winter and the Ruling of Floor 188

In the winter of the year recorded as 4 Precedent Sigma-7, the logging clerks of Floor 188 entered a single line in the Curation Log for the dates 11 through 19: Nothing examined. Nothing to examine. The line was struck through, initialled, and re-entered verbatim on each of the nine days. When the floor's log was audited the following spring, the sequence was challenged on the grounds that a log entry must describe an item, and that no item had been described.

The dispute reached the Ninth Concordance, which ruled that the blank entries were valid attestations of absence and must be preserved. It further ruled — in a clause the clerks still quote to one another — that a struck-through entry retains its legal force, and that "the record of a thing not done is a record of the officer who did not do it" (Ninth Concordance, Clause 41). The nine entries remain in the Floor 188 log and are the most frequently consulted pages in the series. Visitors wishing to see them must apply at the desk on Floor 188 before the second bell; the log is not brought out after the second bell under any circumstances.

Contradiction with Curation Standard 45

Curation Standard 45 requires that items bearing provenance tags linked to negated events be routed automatically to the negating desk, and that the routing be noted in the Curation Log at the moment of receipt. The Librarians have never complied. Their position, stated in a marginal note of long standing and never formally withdrawn, is that a log records what has happened and routing is what is about to happen, and that the two cannot share a line without the line becoming a prediction.

The School of Predictive Curation regards this as a distinction without a difference and has twice petitioned for the logs to be reformatted with a separate routing column. Both petitions were refused on the ground that reformatting would require re-binding, and that the quires of forty leaves are cut to a standard that no longer admits an additional column. The Archive of Superseded Coordinates holds the two refused petitions, filed under the floor numbers they would have affected rather than under the date of refusal, which has made them difficult to find.

Losses and the Disputed Recensions

Two recensions of the Curation Logs circulate. The first, the Long Recension, retains every entry in its original hand. The second, the Fair Recension, was copied by scribes of the Lamplighters' Guild during a period of poor lamp oil and is shorter by some eleven thousand entries, none of which the scribes admit to having omitted. The Archive of Disproven Branches maintains that the omissions are not losses but a separate and equally valid attestation of the same floors on the same days, and that the two recensions should be read side by side. The Seventh Helical Gallery rejects this, noting that the Fair Recension corrects the spelling of several place-names that the Long Recension spells wrongly and that nobody has ever spelled correctly since.

Consultation of the Long Recension requires gloves. Consultation of the Fair Recension does not, and this is the only respect in which the Fair Recension is preferred by working clerks. Both recensions are paged by floor, not by date, so a clerk seeking a particular day must know which floor it happened on before beginning. Most do not, and the logs are therefore read in the order they present themselves, which the Manual of Structural Documentation describes as "the order in which the Tower has chosen to be read" (Schedule 7, note 3).