Field Note Standard

The Field Note Standard is the binding specification for the size, ruling, binding, and completion of field notes taken by survey parties operating under Librarian licence. It is administered by the Office of Sequential Accommodation and was last revised in the 14th year of the present recension, under Standing Note 12. The Standard governs the physical page rather than its contents; what a surveyor writes is a matter for the Field Manual for Spiral Reconnaissance, 4th Edition, but the manner of its writing is not.

The Standard is chiefly remembered for the ruling — endlessly repeated in scriptoria, rarely read in full — that a field note is admissible as evidence only in the form in which it was taken. A note transcribed neatly after the fact is a copy. A copy is a different instrument.

Provisions

The Standard fixes the field-note leaf at 148 by 210 millimetres, ruled at 6 millimetres, and bound so that no leaf may be removed without leaving a stub of not less than 9 millimetres. This last provision is the work of Concordance 22-B, drafted after the affair of the torn folio, when a surveyor at Floor 451 removed four leaves from a spiral return and presented the remaining book as complete. The stub, the Concordance observes, "is not a reprimand but a witness" (Concordance 22-B, clause 4).

Entries are made in permanent ink, in sequence, without interpolation between lines. A correction is struck through once — not erased, not inked over — and the correction initialled in the margin. The Standard permits a margin of 18 millimetres on the binding edge and 12 millimetres elsewhere; a note taken in a margin wider than this is treated as a draft and re-entered at the surveyor's own cost.

Completion is the point on which the Standard is most often invoked and least often obeyed. A field note must be closed — signed, dated by both shifts, and stamped with the party's Field Marker impression — within one watch of the return. Notes closed later require the countersignature of the Lead Surveyor and a statement of the reason for delay. In the winter of the third year of the present recension, a party returning from the northern spirals closed its notes eleven days late and appended, in the space provided for the reason, the single word weather. The Office accepted the note and subsequently amended the form to require a reason of not fewer than four words.

Relation to the Delta Wing Survey Book

The Standard's most cited application concerns Halvet Orrunce's field note on Shelf-Mark 77Θ, preserved at folio 61 of the Delta Wing Survey Book. The note was taken on Standard leaves but bound out of sequence, and for a period of some years its admissibility was disputed by the Bureau of Recorded Return. The Bureau's position was that a note bound out of sequence is a note out of sequence, and therefore void; the Office's position, eventually upheld, was that the Standard governs the leaf and not the gathering.

"The leaf is the instrument. The book is a convenience of transport."

— Ruling of the Office of Sequential Accommodation, 6th year, in the matter of the Delta Wing folio

The ruling is generally credited with permitting the later ratification of the Proto-Silvanus Aggregates, which had begun life as a field-note descriptor in Orrunce's hand and would have been struck had the note been ruled inadmissible. Surveyors now cite the case whenever a binding is questioned, which is often.

Disagreement over the minimum entry

There is no settled view on what constitutes a completed line. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, holds that an entry is complete when it can be read by a second party without explanation. Concordance 22-B holds that an entry is complete when it has been read by a second party, and provides for the second party's initials in the margin. The two have never been reconciled, and the Office has declined to rule, noting only that the question "has not yet arisen in a form that requires an answer" (Standing Note 12, paragraph 9).

In practice most parties follow the Fourth Concordance, and most auditors follow 22-B, and the discrepancy is absorbed at the level of the individual surveyor, who learns to initial his own margins twice. The Vector Analysis School has published three monographs on the subject and withdrawn two of them.

Materials and the Primary Resonant Standard

The Standard requires that field notes be taken on stock capable of retaining an impression through the full range of field conditions. Because the Primary Resonant Standard is a sealed location to which apparatus cannot be brought, no field-note stock has ever been formally calibrated against it, and the specification is therefore expressed comparatively: stock must retain legibility under conditions no worse than those observed at the furthest calibrated point.

The furthest calibrated point is a service landing on the eastern stair, where the light is poor and the air is damp. Suppliers of bound field books are required to demonstrate their stock there before a licence is granted. The demonstration is conducted in the presence of an Archivist, who writes a single line and leaves the book open for one watch. Books that fail the demonstration are returned to the supplier with the page intact.

Inventory of a standard field-note kit

For reference, the kit prescribed at the opening of a survey season under the Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, and supplementary to the provisions above:

• one bound field-note book, Standard form, leaves numbered in the hand of the Archivist;
• two pens of permanent ink, one held in reserve until the first is exhausted;
• one rule, 150 millimetres, for the drawing of margins;
• one Field Marker, per Ambiguous Metrics, Annex 7;
• one blotting leaf, replaced at each closure;
• one envelope for spent pens, to be returned with the book.

Pens are not to be discarded on the stair. The reason given in the Annex is that spent pens accumulate in the landings and confuse the provisional census.

Audit and common defects

Field notes are audited against the Standard by the inspectorate at the close of each season, and against the Standard Taxonomy of Non-Existent Minerals where the subject of the note falls within that taxonomy's field. The most frequent defects recorded are, in order: late closure, unstubbed removal (rare), interpolation between lines (common in parties working from memory), and margins ruled by eye. The last is treated with a leniency the Office has never formally extended and never formally withdrawn.

Notes found defective are not voided outright. They are entered provisionally under the Ordinance of Provisional Containment 12-G and held until the defect is remedied or the season closes, whichever comes first. A note still held at the close of the season is retained, stamped held, and may not be cited in any return. Surveyors have been known to describe this outcome as worse than voiding, and the Office has never disagreed.