Department of Provisional Registries

The Department of Provisional Registries is the Tower body empowered to issue standing directives governing the standard Application process, by which a person, object, condition, or absence acquires an entry in the records before such an entry can be justified. It was constituted to solve a problem of long standing: that the Tower must catalogue a thing the instant it is observed, while the justification for cataloguing it may require years. The Department's answer was to catalogue the thing provisionally — and then to catalogue the provisionality, and, in time, the provisionality of that.

Its seat is the ninth-floor scriptorium of Spire 7, two landings above the headquarters of the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries, with which it shares a chimney and a persistent disagreement. Admission to the public counter is by appointment only. Visitors are asked to leave umbrellas and any unresolved categories with the porter.

Origin and the Fourth Concordance

The Department was raised by the sixth revision of the Concordance of Registries, clause 6.12, which provided that "no observation shall be lost to the delay of its proof" (Concordance of Registries, rev. 6, cl. 6.12). The clause was drafted in response to the Matter of the Wintry Annex, in which a whole season's furniture stood on the eleventh floor for four years awaiting justification before anyone could write it down. The Department was accordingly given authority to issue standing directives for the standard Application process, and the process has proceeded on standing directives ever since.

The Department's authority was later pruned and then regrown. The Mandate of the Tertiary Spiral Registries, promulgated in the ninth revision and sealed about fourteen days later by the Bureau of Spiral Registries, purported to transfer the Application process to the Tertiary Spiral. The Department complied for eleven days, then filed the Mandate under Uncertain Instruments pending its own ruling, where it remains.

The Standard Application process

An Application begins when a thing is entered on a green leaf in triplicate. The first leaf is sent to the Department of Provisional Holdings, the second is copied into the Bureau of Motile Non-Entities where the subject may move, and the third is returned to the applicant as proof of return. The copy is the part that matters. A directive of 1102, reissued without alteration every year since, warns: "the Application is not the entry; it is the promise of one" (Standing Directive 44, cl. 3).

Jurisdiction under Section 4: Provisional Ontology is triggered by filing a White Memorandum with the Office of Provisional Registries, which the Department supervises although it denies supervising. The Department maintains that the Office is a counter within the Department; the Office maintains it is not a counter but a window; and the Office of the Custodian records both claims without comment.

Applicants sometimes confuse the standard process with the altogether rarer procedure for papers that have lost their subjects. Those pass to the Dispersal of the Provisional Archives, and are asked in writing not to return.

Internal structure and discipline

The Department is staffed by Clerks-Registrant under a Principal Clerk-Reader, a post currently held by Eudoxia Pale, who has served since the winter of the Annex and who has ruled on the colour of the leaf seventeen times, thrice reversing herself. Its keepers hold rank by instrument rather than subject: the Keeper of Provisional Inks governs moisture, the Keeper of Provisional Archives governs the ordering of leaves, and the Keeper of Provisional Holdings governs those items whose custody the Department has granted but not transferred — a distinction preserved in a three-page Memorandum on Custody and Custody that no one has successfully summarized.

Its most contentious readers are those who process Librarian-Provisional appointments. The Department holds that a provisional librarian's rank is probationary in nature; the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries holds it probationary in name only; and the two offices have reconciled the matter by refusing to reconcile it. A candidate once applied for a Librarian-Provisional post with an Application that had not yet received an entry, and was provisionally appointed to the post of awaiting it.

"The rank of Librarian-Provisional shall attach to the person provisionally; the provisionality shall attach to the rank permanently."

— Concordance of Registries, rev. 11, Annex 3

Recurring disputes

The Department's standing directives are not ratified by the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries, which has declined to ratify them since 1103, asserting that the Department exceeds its authority when it applies to things already perpetual. The Department's position is that a perpetual thing was once provisional and may be again, and that the Sub-Department's objection is therefore itself an Application awaiting an entry. The dispute is scheduled for review in the seventh revision of the Register of Standing Directives, a revision not yet begun.

A separate complaint was lodged by the Department of Applied Metaphysics in 1107 over the Silvanus void registries, which the Department provisionally entered before the latter office had reconciled them by the Reckoning of Stairs. The complaint was withdrawn when it was discovered that the Department had entered the complaint too, and could not be asked to withdraw a thing it had provisionally entered.

Since the Matter of the Twin Registries of 1109, the Department has also stood accused of maintaining two provisional registries of the same subject at once. It argues that one of the two is a copy and that copies do not count. A minority reading holds that the copy counts twice, once for itself and once for having been copied.

The Provisional Shelf

Applications not yet resolved are held on the Provisional Shelf, a run of recesses along the west wall of the ninth-floor scriptorium. The Shelf is measured annually by the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries; the count of applications is currently 31,904, and the count of those applications that concern themselves is four. The Sub-Department holds that no leaf may be removed from the Shelf before the first frost, which for practical purposes means that the Shelf is cleared every February. The Department has never voiced an objection, and has never explained its silence.