Designation Drift

Designation Drift is a secondary subtype of Standard Drift first classified by the Chamber of Measured Drift in the winter of 1402, denoting the spontaneous reassignment of a registered designation from one holding to another without intervening re-cataloguing. It is distinguished from Nominative Drift, which concerns the alteration of a name, and from Semantic Drift, which concerns the alteration of a name's meaning: Designation Drift concerns the migration of a fixed alphanumeric identifier onto a holding to which it was never issued. The identifier itself is unchanged. Only what it denotes has moved.

Classification and Measurement

Designation Drift is expressed in Standard Drift Units, though at far smaller magnitudes than lateral or nominative varieties. The Chamber's figures for the period 1391–1430 place the median annual rate of Designation Drift at 0.4 SDUs across the general stacks, against 11.7 for Lateral Drift and 6.2 for Retroactive Drift. It is therefore the least violent of the drift families and the one least likely to be noticed before an inventory.

The drift is recorded by the Registry of Lingual Drift, which consults with the Sub-committee on Nominative Drift on boundary cases and with the Office of Issued Marks on questions of identifier valence. A holding that has been redesignated is not itself altered; the archival staff proceed on the standing principle that the mark has moved and the book has stayed still, though the phrase appears in no Concordance and has been attributed variously to Librarian Osmun Thale and to an undated margin note in the Second Register of Marks.

The Vellum Affair of Floor 211

The classic case is that of Floor 211, recorded in 1407. Between the 3rd and the 19th of Harvest-month, the identifier D.211.44 was observed to denominate, in succession, a folio of tide-tables, an unbound herbal, a brass surveyor's ring, and a memorandum concerning drainage. The folio had not been moved. The herbal had not been accessed. The ring, the Chamber noted, "was not, strictly, a holding, and its designation was withdrawn on the 21st" (Chamber of Measured Drift, Ledger of Anomalous Marks, entry 211/44).

The matter came before the Concordance on Marks and Their Bearers in 1409, which ruled that a designation could not be said to have drifted unless it had first been formally fixed, and that the Fixing of D.211.44 had been defective in a respect the Concordance declined to specify. The ruling resolved nothing and was cited for the next sixty years.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether Designation Drift is a genuine drift at all. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, holds that "a designation is a property of the register, not of the thing registered, and cannot drift, in the manner of a name, for it has nowhere to go" — the so-called register theory, defended at length by Librarian Ceva Marn in her Commentary on Annex 2.

Against this, the Drift Clause and its associated provisions are read by the Chamber as presupposing that designations occupy position and can be displaced; the Fourth Concordance, §17, speaks plainly of "designations found out of their appointed places," a phrase the register theorists hold to be figurative and the Chamber holds to be decisive. The Dispute of the Displaced Drift turned on exactly this divergence and was not settled, only shelved.

A minor third position, advanced in the Observations on the Marks of the Lower Third, maintains that the drift is real but retroactive, and ought to be filed under Retroactive Drift Assessment. The Chamber has not adopted this, but it has not struck it out either.

Detection and Residue

Designation Drift deposits a faint Drift-Sheen, most reliably observed on shelf-edges and on the verso of accession labels, where it appears as a discoloration resembling a lifted seal. Ink-Drift Observation is the standard method of confirming a suspected migration, and Conceptual Anchoring is the customary countermeasure, applied before an inventory rather than after.

Drift-sheen from designation events fades within four to six years, which is why the earlier cases are known mainly through testimony. Where the sheen has been allowed to accumulate, it is cleaned with a soft cloth and a solution of one part vinegar to nine parts water. Holdings so cleaned must be left to dry for a full day before being reshelved.

Recorded Incidents

The following designations were recorded in migration during the survey of 1428. All were returned to their issued holdings.

• M.088.12 — from a register of tides to a sealed chest of unknown contents, Floor 88.
• D.211.44 — recurring; see above.
• C.401.07 — from a catalogue of extinct stairwells to the stairwell it catalogued, Floor 401.
• Q.000.03 — from an unnumbered floor; the validity of the designation remains under review.

The third of these is the only known instance of a designation settling on its own subject, and the Chamber records it without comment.

"Where a mark is found upon two holdings at once, the earlier claim is not thereby the better claim. It is merely earlier."

— Concordance on Marks and Their Bearers, Annex 6

Contemporary practice treats Designation Drift as routine and, so long as it is caught before the annual inventory, harmless. The Sub-committee on Nominative Drift nevertheless maintains a standing instruction that no designation shall be formally corrected on the same day it is observed to have moved, on the grounds that marks corrected in haste have a tendency to return to where they were found.