Form M-7 'Declaration of Nonexistence'

Scope and function

Form M-7 'Declaration of Nonexistence' is the primary instrument for initiating an entry within the Provisional Indexing system, as established by the Provisional Guidelines for Intake (Revision 42). It accompanies every submission filed under those Guidelines and asserts, on behalf of the petitioner, that the subject proposed for cataloguing lacks independent existence outside its own proposed description. The assertion is procedural rather than philosophical: the form does not ask whether the thing exists, but rather records that the petitioner is prepared to proceed as though it does not, so that a shelf, a number, and a clerk may be assigned. The current revision of the form measures 216 by 279 millimetres and bears four fields, of which three are mandatory. Petitioners frequently complete the fourth field, reserved for the reason the subject was proposed in the first place, and are thereafter surprised to learn that no office reads it.

History

The Form M-7 was first issued in 4412 as a single leaf, handwritten, and was not numbered. Its adoption as a mandatory attachment followed the incident known as the Ninefold Cataloguing, in which an unaccompanied submission was processed eleven times by separate scriptoria on the same afternoon, producing eleven incompatible entries for one subject and a dispute that the Third Concordance resolved only by burning four of them. The burning was recorded as administrative; three of the surviving entries still cite the destroyed ones. Revision 42, which fixed the form's present wording, was promulgated after Form L 22 Declaration of Descriptive Sufficiency demonstrated that descriptions could be made sufficient without ever touching the matter of existence. The two instruments are frequently confused by petitioners, and the confusion is not always the petitioner's fault: before 4487 they shared a clerk.

Procedure

A completed Form M-7 is submitted at the Station of Declaration and thence forwarded to the Provisional Indexing desks. Where the subject is a document, the form must be stapled to its upper-left corner, beneath any existing seal. Where the subject is a place, it must be filed in duplicate and accompanied by a floor reference; where it is a person or office, in triplicate, with the petitioner's own name withheld. Submissions lacking the form are returned unopened, a practice that has generated more correspondence than any other rule of the Provisional Guidelines. Two provisions of the form are worth noting for their exceptions. The first concerns subjects whose nonexistence is contingent — those that exist on one floor and not on another — and is handled by Form B-9 "Declaration of Provisional Existence", which the M-7 petitioner files alongside. The second concerns subjects that assert their own nonexistence as a defining property; here the M-7 is refused outright and the matter is referred to Form 18-C: Declaration of Conceptual Null State.

Declaration 88-C

The most-cited constraint on the M-7 is Declaration 88-C, which invalidates any Declaration of Nonexistence for an entity defined by its own anticipated verification. In practice this catches subjects whose description already contains the phrase "will be confirmed by inspection," or equivalents. A well-known instance involved a subject proposed in 4491 as "the volume that will be found on the shelf where it is catalogued"; the M-7 filed for it was rejected under 88-C, and the resulting appeal was carried to the Office of Concordance Alignment, where it remains, aligned but unread, alongside the dockets governed by Precedential Declaration Docket. Scholars disagree about the scope of 88-C. One reading holds that it applies only to entities whose verification is scheduled; a second, associated with the annalists of the eastern annexes, holds that it applies to anything whose entry is anticipated at all, which would render most of the Provisional Indexing void. The Concordances support both readings, at different clauses, and neither has been amended out of existence.

Related instruments

The M-7 sits within a dense family of declaratory papers. Where the M-7 declares nonexistence, Form D-44a declares a deficiency, and Contradiction Submission Form 7-B declares that two prior declarations cannot both hold. Petitioners frequently attempt to file all three at once; this is permitted, and the resulting bundle is known informally as a triple, though no Concordance uses the term. For subjects whose existence is admitted but whose description is contested, the appropriate route is Form L-29 or, where sentiment is material, Form DRS-44a: Submission of Personal Sentiment for Official Consideration. For subjects that have already been declared nonexistent and have reappeared, the Office maintains Form Ω-7A, which is issued without comment and should not be discussed in the presence of the subject. Visitors to the Provisional Indexing desks are asked not to lean on the intake counter during the winter months; the timber swells, and forms submitted beneath pressure have been known to adhere to one another.