Floor 506

Floor 506 is a reclassification floor, one of eleven floors in the 500s whose holdings are neither stored nor displayed but held under review, and it is chiefly known for the Provisional Registers, the only catalogue series in the Tower that records items before it is known what they are. It lies administratively between Floor 441 and Floor 498, an arrangement set out in the siting schedule of the Fourth Concordance and never since revised, though the schedule itself has been revised forty-one times. The floor occupies a single annular gallery, 212 metres in circuit, with a low vaulted ceiling and no windows. Visitors are asked to remain in the outer aisle and not to remove the strings.

Establishment and the Reclassification Question

Floor 506 was constituted by Ordinance 88 in the winter following the collapse of the shelf-ladders on Floor 449, an event which displaced some nine thousand items whose subjects had not yet been determined. The Librarians faced a difficulty of principle: an item cannot be shelved until its floor is known, and its floor cannot be known until it is described, and it cannot be described until it is shelved. Ordinance 88, clause 3, resolved this by creating a class of holdings called provisional, which are entered on Floor 506 with a number but no subject, and remain there until a subject attaches to them or until it is decided that none will.

"An article may be held provisionally for a period not exceeding the life of its register, and shall be described in the terms in which it arrived, however partial."

— Ordinance 88, clause 3(b)

The clause has been read strictly since the Ruling of the Ninth Scriptorium, which held that a provisional entry may not be given a made-up subject merely to move it along, and that clerks who do so are to be reassigned to the copying rooms. The ruling is remembered for the grievance of the clerk Emeric Voss, who had assigned subjects to 1,300 provisional entries over four years and whose work was struck out in a single afternoon; his marginal note on the register — "each of these things is plainly something" — survives on the flyleaf of Register 506/12 and is quoted more often than the ruling.

The Provisional Registers

The floor holds thirty registers in binding order, numbered 506/1 to 506/30, of which fourteen are closed and sixteen continue in use. Entries are made in ink on ruled paper and are deliberately sparse: an arrival date, a physical description, and where possible the direction from which the item came. The registers are legible to anyone; what they lack is meaning, and this has made Floor 506 a customary first stop for expeditions returning from the upper floors in the belief that their inventories will be understood there. They are not understood there. They are entered.

The floor's permanent holdings, as of the last binding, comprise:

• Thirty registers, fourteen closed and sixteen in use;
• One hundred and nine items under active review, none described by subject;
• Four hundred and six items awaiting a second reading;
• Eleven chairs, of which two are for visitors.

Dispute with Floor 2001

A long-standing jurisdictional disagreement exists between Floor 506 and Floor 2001 over items whose subject is procedural rather than substantive. Floor 2001, which administers the archive's own paperwork, has since the Sixth Concordance claimed all materials that describe processes, forms, or the conduct of business; Floor 506 claims all materials that arrive without a subject, on the ground that a procedural item is still an item. The matter was referred to Concordance 12 and settled, in the Tower's fashion, by the addition of Annex 12/4, which provides that such items "shall be held on the floor of arrival until the floor of arrival is disputed."

The practical result is that a disputed item now sits on whichever floor received it while both floors dispute it, and in the case of the Ledger of Unfiled Returns the dispute has continued for sixty-two years without the ledger moving. A memorandum of the Office of Seals dated to the fourth year of the present registry notes, in the flat register of that office, that the ledger is to be left where it is and dusted quarterly.

Circulation and Access

Floor 506 may be reached from Floor 441 by the north stair, which arrives at the gallery's sixth alcove, or from Floor 498 by the service landing, whose door is kept locked and whose key is held by the floor's senior clerk. Items may be consulted in place but not borrowed; an item may be borrowed only once it has a subject, which is to say only once it has left the floor, which is to say never.

Two forms of removal do occur. An item is released when a resolving Librarian assigns it a subject and a destination, at which point it is carried out through the north stair and its register entry closed with a single stroke. An item is suspended when the review is halted without resolution; suspended items remain on the shelves, marked with a white paper tag, and are not consulted. The Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, states that suspension is not a decision and carries no weight in later proceedings, though Concordance 9 treats a suspended item as "withheld," which is why suspensions are recorded twice, once in the register and once in the Ledger of Withheld Matter on Floor 606.

Catalogued Incident: The Long Review of 506/19

Between the closing of Register 506/18 and the opening of 506/19, a period of nineteen years, no item on the floor was assigned a subject. The cause was a disagreement between the reviewing Librarians as to whether a subject, once proposed, could be withdrawn. Concordance 12 holds that it cannot; Concordance 9, Annex 7, holds that every proposal lapses at the close of the register in which it is made, and thus that all proposals made during those nineteen years had already lapsed before anyone could act on them. The matter was referred upward and returned unaltered. The review resumed when a junior clerk observed that the items had been entered in a register that had closed, and could accordingly be re-entered in the current one as fresh arrivals. Nineteen years of provisional holding were thereby voided without a ruling, and the floor's log for that year records the fact in a single line, followed by a note that the ladder in the third alcove needed a new foot.