Doctrinal Re-cataloguing

Doctrinal Re-cataloguing is the formal procedure by which a holding already entered in the Tower's registers is removed from its shelf, struck from its volume, and returned to the catalogue under a revised doctrinal description. It is distinguished from first cataloguing in that the subject is not new and from simple correction in that the subject itself is held unchanged; only the doctrine of its placement is amended. The practice is governed chiefly by Fourth Concordance Annex 12, as amended nine times, and is administered by the Office of Revised Entries on Floor 2,214.

Re-cataloguing is regarded within the Librarians' order as an admission of doctrinal drift rather than of error. A holding wrongly catalogued at the outset is a mistake; a holding correctly catalogued in its own generation and incorrectly catalogued in ours is an instance of doctrine having moved beneath a stationary subject. The distinction is preserved in the record by the convention of the double stamp, by which the original entry is struck through in red and the revised entry written above it in black, with neither removed.

Origins

The procedure emerged from the practical difficulties of Doctrinal Integration, which from its earliest recensions required that holdings reconciled under a new synthesis be re-entered rather than merely annotated. The first systematic use of re-cataloguing is recorded in the winter of the year the archive numbers 611 after the Sealing of the Lower Stacks, when the Office of Revised Entries was separated from the Office of First Entries following a dispute over who was to bear the cost of shelf relocation. The separation was confirmed by Ninth Concordance, Article 3, which also established that the two offices should not share a corridor.

Earlier partial practice is attested in the marginalia of Doctrinal Incunabula, where at least forty entries show signs of having been physically scraped and reinscribed. The annotator — identified only by the initials V.R., and identified by some scholars with the compiler Verrin of the Second Gallery — remarks beside one such scraping that the holding had "changed its doctrine without changing its appearance, which is the worst kind of change." The remark is frequently quoted in the Office's own instruction.

Procedure

A re-cataloguing is initiated by the filing of a Notice of Doctrinal Inconsistency, which may be raised by any Librarian who can demonstrate that a holding now falls under a doctrine other than the one under which it was entered. The Notice is examined by the Office of Revised Entries, which consults the appropriate chapter of the Doctrinal Variances Register and issues a Provisional Re-designation. The holding is then withdrawn from the shelf for a period of not less than eleven days and not more than four years, during which time its location is marked by a wooden placeholder bearing the old entry, the new entry, and the number of the Notice.

Two rules govern the shelf itself, and both are frequently breached. The first is that the holding must be returned to the same physical position it occupied before withdrawal, regardless of the doctrinal distance between the entries. The second is that the placeholder must be removed before the holding is re-shelved, since the failure to do so produced the eleven-month interleaving of Floor 3,088 in which placeholders accumulated faster than holdings and the stack was eventually closed to readers. The Doctrinal Omission principle later codified a limited right to leave a withdrawn holding off-shelf indefinitely where its new description is contested, a concession Doctrinal Review has twice attempted to narrow.

Relation to other doctrines

Re-cataloguing is closely bound to Permissible Incompleteness: where a holding is manifestly incomplete, the revised entry may record the incompleteness as a feature of the holding rather than as a defect in the register, and the revision proceeds without waiting for the missing portion. The practice is also the standard remedy prescribed for a Cataloguing Anomaly, though anomalous holdings are re-catalogued only after a Doctrinal Edict has been issued, since the revision would otherwise have no doctrine to revise toward. The Schism of the Unfinished Index turned in part on whether re-cataloguing could be applied to holdings that had never been completely catalogued in the first place; the Realist Position held that it could not, on the ground that one cannot re-enter what was never entered, while the majority on the Synod held that the register's practice of partial entry constituted an entry for these purposes.

Disputed points

Scholars disagree on the permissible interval between withdrawal and re-entry. Fifth Concordance Annex 2, clause 14, fixes the interval at "no longer than the doctrine requires and no shorter than the shelf permits," which the Office of Revised Entries has read as a maximum of four years. Eleventh Concordance, in a passage widely taken to be a deliberate contradiction, states instead that a withdrawn holding "shall not be returned while its doctrine remains in dispute," a rule under which some holdings have been off-shelf for over two centuries. The two readings are reconciled in the Office's instruction only by the observation that the Fourth and Eleventh Concordances were promulgated by different Synods and that the later does not cite the earlier.

A second dispute concerns whether revision may be reversed. The Registry of Immaculate States records instances in which a re-catalogued holding was later restored to its original entry on the ground that the revision had itself acquired the status of settled doctrine. The Registry's compilers treat these as cases of the Ruling of Immaculate Recursion; the Manifold Purists treat them as evidence that the shelf, and not the doctrine, is the only stable element in the procedure, a claim the Office has declined to answer in writing.

Visiting Librarians are reminded that the wooden placeholders are not to be reshelved as holdings.