Floor 2004

Floor 2004 is a contested administrative floor, recorded in the Floor 2001 register as a substation of the archival corridor but catalogued independently since at least the Third Concordance. Its number is not sequential with any neighbour: the floor is entered from Floor 2001 through a door marked 2004 and exits, by the same stair, onto a landing signed 2001 in the hand of a different signatory. No expedition has established whether these are the same landing. The floor's own inventory lists four hundred and six linear feet of shelving, one standing desk, and a bell.

Description and immediate surroundings

Floor 2004 occupies a single compressed gallery, 31.7 metres in length by 4.2 metres in width, lit by eleven apertures on the east wall. The shelving holds administrative instruments rather than books: blank forms, seals in trays, and the bound returns of floors too small to keep their own records. Accession notes describe a persistent draught from the north end, attributed in the Fourth Concordance to "the corridor beyond, which does not require a door." No such corridor has been surveyed.

The floor is administered alongside Floor 202 by a shared secretariat, an arrangement dating to the Concordance of Shared Secretariats and never renewed. Clerks posted to 2004 are recorded in the same ledger as clerks posted to 202, which has caused difficulties. The floor's bell is rung at the close of business and not otherwise.

The Compressed Gallery dispute

The status of Floor 2004 has been disputed since the Seventh Recension. The Third Concordance, Annex 9, holds that a floor of fewer than forty metres "is a room, and is numbered as a room," which would require 2004 to be renumbered as a room of Floor 2001 and its holdings absorbed. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, holds the opposite: that length is not determinative of rank, and that "a floor is a floor by continuance, and is numbered as a floor." Both annexes carry the seal of the same scriptorium, nine days apart.

The practical consequence is a disagreement over the shelving. If 2004 is a room, its four hundred and six linear feet are counted toward the Floor 2001 allowance and the floor is over quota by eighty-one feet. If it is a floor, the allowance is separate and the shelving is in order. The Librarians have declined to rule, on the ground that a ruling would settle the matter.

"Where two annexes of equal seal conflict, the earlier is observed until the later is amended, whichever was written first."

— Ordinance of Precedence, clause 3

The winter of the misplaced returns

In the winter following the Ninth Recension, a clerk of the 202 secretariat, Ossava Lind, was assigned to reconcile the 2004 returns with the shared ledger. Lind found that eighty-one feet of the shelving contained returns belonging to Floor 202 itself, filed at 2004 by a predecessor who had read the Third Concordance as controlling. Lind returned the documents to 202 and recorded the transfer in the 2004 log, which brought the floor's holdings to the quota exactly. The 202 secretariat replied that the documents had never been absent and that the log entry was therefore "an error of memory committed in writing."

The disagreement was referred to the Office of Floor Allowances, which found, in a determination of eleven pages, that the documents were in both places and that the log should record both. Lind's marginal note on the determination survives in the 2004 copy: "Then the shelving at 202 is also over quota." No reply is recorded. Lind was reassigned to Floor 606 the following spring and did not return.

Holdings

The floor's standing inventory, as last certified, is as follows:

• Returns of floors below 400, bound in fifteen volumes, 213 linear feet
• Seal trays, sixty-two, of which nine are empty and one is sealed shut
• Blank forms, classified by the Floor 113 calibration schedule
• The 2004 log, three volumes, the second incomplete

Access and visitation

Floor 2004 is reached from Floor 2001 by the north stair and from nowhere else. Visitors are asked to sign the log on entry and to sign it again on leaving, in ink; the second signature is compared with the first, and discrepancies are referred to the secretariat. The standing desk may not be moved. The Floor 147 calibration team surveyed the gallery in the ninth year of the Ninth Recension and found the eleven apertures "correct to within the tolerance of the instruments available," a finding that has been cited in favour of the floor's independent status ever since, though the instruments were calibrated for light.

The floor is not listed among the Floor 441 series, nor among the annexes of Floor 9,011, although a duplicate catalogue card for 2004 was found filed at the latter in the second volume of the 2004 log. The card has been retained. It is not known which floor it belongs to, and by the Ordinance of Precedence clause 3 it will remain where it was found until it is amended.