Descriptive Abstract

The Descriptive Abstract is a documentary instrument of Descriptive Jurisprudence, a compressed statement of a subject's descriptive exposure issued prior to, and in anticipation of, full cataloguing. It is not itself a catalogue entry, and the distinction has been maintained with some ferocity since the practice was regularised under Fourth Concordance, Annex 2 (the "Short Form" annex). A Descriptive Abstract records what may be said about a subject without recording the subject; in the phrasing of the Bureau of Abstract Metrics, it "holds the shape of a description before the description is obliged to hold anything at all."

Abstracts are filed in triplicate on Floor 1,146, the middle copy sealed, the third copy retained by the originating scriptorium for a period of eleven years. They are among the few instruments in the Tower that may be lodged against a subject that has not yet been located.

Origins and the Short Form annex

The form arose from a practical difficulty recorded in the proceedings of Sub-Committee 9-B, which in the winter of the year recorded as 3,041 found itself unable to catalogue a staircase on Floor 2,209 that appeared to possess two landings more than its plan allowed. The survey party's report notes that "the stair could be described but not fixed" and recommended that description proceed while the object remained in dispute. The recommendation was taken up by the Proctorate of Abstract Logistics and issued as Annex 2 to the Fourth Concordance in the following year.

Annex 2 established the three-part form still in use: a header naming the subject loosely or not at all; a body of provisional descriptive statements; and a footer of retirements, in which statements withdrawn before filing are listed so that they may be counted. The retirements are the only part of the instrument that carries an evidential weight of its own, and clerks have been known to pad them.

Relation to the Axiom and the Theorem

Scholarship treats the Abstract as a procedural concession to The Axiom of Descriptive Exhaustion, which stabilises a subject only once all possible descriptive statements have been catalogued or retired. The Abstract cannot exhaust anything; it presumes. Its function is to allow a subject to be worked upon while its exhaustion is pending, on the model of a suspension of cataloguing order — likened by scholars of Descriptive Jurisprudence to a paused clock, which continues to keep time in the sense that it continues to be a clock.

The Theorem of Descriptive Sufficiency supplies the ceiling. Where the Abstract is used to invoke the mechanisms of the Theorem, the resulting instrument is not the Abstract proper but Form L 22 Declaration of Descriptive Sufficiency, which requires a minimum viable descriptive matrix and cannot be lodged against an unlocated subject. The distinction is frequently muddled by junior clerks, and the Pedantic Gradient has been applied in at least nine disciplinary proceedings arising from the confusion.

Non-corporeal submissions

Abstracts issued against subjects without corporeal extent are receipted through the Abstract Receipt, the corresponding series for corporeal submissions having been suspended indefinitely by Sixth Concordance, Clause 88. The Resource Allocation for the Abstract has pressed for the suspension to be lifted on the ground that the corpus of abstracts has grown too large to be verified by eye, and has twice been refused, most recently in a ruling that noted the request was itself an abstract of a request.

Holdings of non-corporeal abstracts are held in the Annex of Provisional Statements at the foot of Floor 1,147. The reading room is closed during the ringing of the second bell. Visitors are asked not to bring coats.

The Sevrin dispute

The longest-running scholarly disagreement over the Descriptive Abstract concerns precedence between the registering office and the originating scriptorium, and is still known by the name of the clerk who raised it. Clerk Sevrin of the Ninth Recension lodged an abstract in the year recorded as 3,318 describing a corridor on Floor 1,412 that had already been catalogued nine years earlier under the name "the Unlit Corridor." Sevrin's abstract did not name the corridor and described only its acoustics. The corridor's existing catalogue entry described only its lighting.

The question put to the Librarians was whether an abstract could be voided for describing a subject already held when it had not known it was doing so. Fifth Concordance, Clause 41 held that an abstract is void only if the subject is named in it. Sixth Concordance, Clause 12 held that an abstract is void if the subject can be identified from it by any competent clerk. The two clauses have never been reconciled. The corridor now carries three entries, of which two dispute each other and one is Sevrin's, which has been amended forty-one times and no longer describes a corridor.

"An instrument that identifies by any means is an instrument that identifies, and the plea of ignorance is a plea about the clerk, not the instrument."

— Sixth Concordance, Clause 12, marginal gloss of the Ninth Recension

Decline and current practice

Abstracts fell into disfavour after the Bureau of Abstract Metrics reclassified the luminous flux of lumen-moss as a discrete illumination asset and found that some two thousand abstracts of lumen-moss holdings had been describing the same quantity under four different names. The Bureau's audit, published as Lode 17, recommended that abstracts be issued only against subjects whose existence was agreed and whose extent was not.

Current practice follows the recommendation imperfectly. Abstracts continue to be filed at a rate of some six hundred a year, chiefly against disputed staircases, undocumented draughts, and matters arising from Vocalisations of Abstract Entities, Vol. XII. The indexing practice follows Cataloguing Standards in all particulars save one: abstracts are indexed under the first word of their retirements rather than their headers, on the reasoning that a retirement is a statement the Tower has already decided to make.