Department of Ambiguous Provenance

The Department of Ambiguous Provenance is a subordinate office of the Office of Provenance, constituted to receive, weigh, and where possible assign an origin to holdings whose ownership two or more departments have declined to fix. It is not to be confused with the Department of Provenance, from which it was severed in the Reorganization of Floor 209, nor with the Department of Ambiguous Metrics, with which it shares several stairwells and a persistent disagreement about the second landing.

The Department occupies the eastern bays of Floor 209 and maintains a reading room, four weighing chambers, and a linen cupboard that has been the subject of an unresolved requisition since the winter of 1147.

Origin and the Reorganization of Floor 209

Until the Reorganization, all questions of uncertain origin were heard by the Department of Provenance sitting in full session. The arrangement collapsed in the winter of 1147, when a shipment of forty-one transparencies arrived with documentation sufficient to satisfy three separate sub-offices and to contradict, in the matter of the sender, all three of them. The session ran to eleven days. A recordist of the period, Under-Clerk Maren Voss, noted in the margin of the minute-book that "the room grew warm, and then the question grew warm, and only one of the two was opened."

The Concordance of Severed Duties (Concordance 41, annex 6) divided the office thereafter: matters of unknown origin to the new Department, matters of disputed origin to the Vault of Ambiguous Provenance, and matters of no origin at all to the Vault of Ambiguous Records. The division has never been considered satisfactory by any of the three.

Method of determination

The Department works by elimination across what its standing instruction calls the Four Questions: whether a holding was made, whether it was moved, whether it was moved by anyone, and whether the moving was the holding's own doing. A holding that answers no to all four is returned to the shelf with a certificate of persistent anonymity and is not examined again for nine years.

Calibration is performed against standards issued by the Department of Ambiguous Metrics before that department's dissolution. The Department retains three sets of Ambiguous Calipers of its own, of which one is serviceable; the second is retained for comparison; the third is missing and is entered in the inventory as "present in principle."

All determinations are entered on Form 88-C: Provenance Slip and countersigned by two clerks who must not have spoken to one another that morning.

The Frication dispute

The Department's most durable quarrel concerns The Edict of Ambiguous Frication, issued by the Department of Ambiguous Metrics in the last year of its operation, which purported to settle how holdings that had been rubbed, scraped, or otherwise abraded were to be attributed. The Department of Ambiguous Provenance reads the Edict narrowly: frication changes the surface of a thing and not its origin, and a scraped object remains what it was before it was scraped. The Office of Provenance reads it broadly, and has twice returned the Department's findings on that ground.

"Let the surface be altered and the origin be not; and let no office multiply the one into the other for the convenience of its shelves."

— Edict of Ambiguous Frication, clause 3

The Office of Provenance holds that clause 3 was intended only for glass. The Department has asked, in Memorial 12, how the clause is to be read for vellum, and has received no answer since 1203.

Relationship to the Vault

The Department is not a repository. When a determination is upheld it is the Vault of Ambiguous Provenance that receives the holding, and when a MAP-2 challenge succeeds the holding travels in the other direction, to the Department, for re-examination. The two offices share a vestibule, a kettle, and an outstanding disagreement about which of them is responsible for the vestibule's door. Form 88-C exists chiefly to record this traffic.

The Department also maintains the provisional sigil register, under which contested holdings are catalogued under sigils such as Sigil 8.14.γ-β until such time as an origin is agreed. Sigils are retired when a holding is definitively attributed, and are then placed in a drawer. The drawer is not indexed.

Personnel and the Voss grievance

The Department is presently led by a Senior Attributor, a post held since 1191 by Senior Attributor Edvin Marle, whose ruling on the transparencies of 1147 — that they had been sent by no one and had arrived nonetheless — is still cited in both directions. The Provenance Master signs the Department's annual return; the current Master's signature has been queried twice on grounds of legibility and once on grounds of identity.

The Department's long grievance is the Voss matter. Under-Clerk Maren Voss, having recorded the eleven-day session of 1147, applied for transfer to the new Department and was refused on the ground that no record existed of the application. Voss produced the application. The Department replied that the application could not establish its own receipt, and Voss's appeal to the Provenance Index was filed, indexed, and subsequently found to have been filed and indexed by Voss. The grievance remains open. It is heard each year on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and has not yet been reached on the agenda.

Reading room

The reading room is open to accredited researchers between the second and fourth hours. Haze Theory may not be discussed at the tables. Coats are to be left in the vestibule, and the vestibule is the other office's.