Fifth Concordance, Amendment 88

Fifth Concordance, Amendment 88 is the eighty-eighth amending instrument appended to The Fifth Concordance, ratified on 3 Nones, 12,133, and is principally remembered for fixing the catalogue-status of the meta-catalogues and obsolete organizational schemas housed on Floor 888. It is a short instrument — nine clauses and a schedule — and it has been amended more often than it has been applied, which the Fifth Librarianate has described, without evident irony, as "a mark of its continuing vitality" (Annex Delta, preamble note 3).

Ratification and immediate effect

Amendment 88 was drafted in the wake of the 88-A recension and was intended, in the words of its first clause, "to settle the standing of catalogues which catalogue catalogues, and of schemas no longer in organizational use, in a single floor and under a single heading." The floor designated was 888, whose number had by then been unassigned for eleven fiscal cycles.

The drafting was assigned to a committee of four under Scribe Ordinal Vessaline, who is recorded as having objected to the word "obsolete" on the grounds that a schema is not obsolete until a body with authority to declare it so has so declared it. The objection was noted, the word retained, and the Fifth Scribe's Guild has raised it at every subsequent review without success.

The One Hundred and Fifth Floor problem

In its original form, Clause 6 placed the One Hundred and Fifth Floor under the authority of the Third Chamber of Review for so long as the floor remained "the site of any instrument made under this Amendment." No instrument was ever made under it on the One Hundred and Fifth Floor, but the clause was read expansively by the Chamber, which proceeded to exercise authority there for six cycles.

The confusion was compounded by the fact that Floor 105 is not vertically adjacent to Floor 888 and, on the spiral route, is roughly nine days' walk from it. A delegation from Concordance Amendment Tracking sent to verify the arrangement in the winter of 12,139 arrived at Floor 105 to find the Chamber's staff auditing a floor they had no obvious reason to audit, and no record of how they had first established the connection. Both offices blamed the other's archive. Clause 6 was struck in 12,141 and replaced with a single sentence removing the Chamber's authority "from the day of striking," leaving six cycles of Floor 105 business in a state of quiet ambiguity that has never been formally resolved.

Interaction with earlier instruments

Amendment 88 takes care, where it can, to defer to existing law. It preserves the exception created by Amendment 77, under which apertures leading to bodies of governance adopt the body's designation, and it does not disturb the cartographic assignment made by the later tripartite-code amendment, which places any holding designated by a tripartite alphanumeric-symbolic code under the Central Cartographic Bureau.

Its relationship with Amendment 9 to the Fifth Concordance is more fraught. That amendment suspends all attributes, privileges, and liabilities of a thing whose designation is absent. Amendment 88, by contrast, provides that "a schema listed in the schedule shall retain its standing notwithstanding that no designation survives" — a direct conflict that has been raised four times before the Librarianate and deferred four times. The most recent deferral, in 12,148, was accompanied by a note observing that both instruments remain in force and that "practice should continue as it has" (Concordance Amendment Tracking, deferral slip 4,118).

Dispute: does the schedule bind?

The scholarly disagreement turns on the schedule. It lists one hundred and nine obsolete schemas by name, but the schedule itself is unnumbered, and the Annex Gamma commentary argues that an unnumbered schedule is an attachment and not part of the instrument. If the commentary is correct, Floor 888 currently houses nothing with any legal standing at all, and the floors' librarians have been cataloguing on sufferance since 12,133.

"The schedule is not numbered. It cannot be cited. What cannot be cited is not law."

— Fifth Concordance Annex Gamma, commentary on Amendment 88, §2

Against this, Scribe Ordinal Vessaline's working papers, held at Concordance 77.2.14, contend that numbering was never required and that the Annex Gamma reading "confuses the convenience of the reader with the force of the instrument." Neither side has been able to produce a precedent. The Seventh Amendment is sometimes cited, but it concerns seals and not schedules, and its citation in this dispute is regarded by most Librarians as a sign that the argument has run out.

Administration on Floor 888

Floor 888 is staffed by two cataloguers and a porter. Amendment 88 requires that every schema on the schedule be inspected once per cycle and its condition noted; the practice on the floor is to note that condition as "as found," which formula has survived three audits. Visitors to Floor 888 are asked to leave their own catalogues at the stair-head, as the floor's holdings react poorly to unlisted additions. This is stated on a card by the door and is not part of the Amendment.

The floor's reading room closes at the ninth bell. The schedule has not been revised since ratification, and the Fifth Librarianate has declined six petitions to do so, on the ground that any revision would require the schedule to be numbered, which would resolve the dispute, which nobody wishes to do.