Holding Protocol

The Holding Protocol is the body of physical and bureaucratic procedures applied to any volume whose subject matter contradicts the indexing principles of its assigned floor. It is not, as is sometimes supposed by junior staff, a single document. The Protocol comprises the Protocol of Archive in its recensed form, the standing instructions of Archive Delta-7, and a schedule of local variations filed by individual floors under Clause 22 of the Third Concordance whenever local conditions have been deemed to require them. Where these sources conflict, the conflict is administered rather than resolved, a practice given formal standing under the Principle of Inertial Administration.

The Protocol entered general application following the fourth recension of the Second Concordance, Annex D, which extended provisional holding arrangements — until then confined to Annex 19b — to all holdings whose subject sat awkwardly against their assigned classification. The extension was intended to last one cycle. It has been renewed, with intervals, since Cycle 733.

Scope and thresholds

A volume enters the Protocol only after the seven tests of the Protocol of Manifest Delineation have been applied and at least one has returned an adverse finding. The adverse finding need not be the first, the last, or the most recent; in practice the Scriptorium records the first adverse finding and does not re-examine the others, for reasons set out in Clause 401.7 and defended at length, though not persuasively, by the Office of Delineation.

Once entered, the volume is subject to the physical procedures — sealing, weighing, relocation to a holding shelf, and the recording of a countersigned tag — and to the bureaucratic procedures, principally the formation of a dual folio under the Dual-Entry Protocol and the setting of a contemplation interval. The interval is fixed at forty-one days. It was formerly forty days; the additional day was added at the insistence of the Office of Weights, which argued that forty days had acquired a devotional character inconsistent with holding. Nobody has proposed returning it.

The physical procedures

The physical procedures are frequently mistaken for the whole of the Protocol, because they are the only part visible to a reader. A holding under the Protocol is shelved with its fore-edge reversed and its spine plate removed, and its catalogue card is replaced by a card of a different stock weight. Readers wishing to consult a holding during its interval may request the sight-unseen edition, which is issued without the volume. The sight-unseen edition is itself catalogued. Holdings of it are common in the literature of the subject and are, on the whole, more orderly than the originals.

The fourth procedural phase — administrative consolidation — was transferred from the Protocol of Archive to the Ω Protocol in a revision of the present cycle, a change that has caused more difficulty than it settled. Clerks in the Eastern Stairwell, who had administered the phase for nine generations, continued to administer it for a further two years after the transfer, and the resulting double consolidation of eight hundred and forty holdings was only discovered when a reader requested a volume and was brought two, identical except in binding.

The question of the second folio

Scholars disagree on whether the dual folio is a constituent of the Holding Protocol or an obligation standing independently alongside it. The Seventeenth Concordance describes the folio as "appurtenant to holding, and not separate from it, though capable of separate citation" (Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 4). The Protocol of Contradictory Attribution treats it as an independent channel, available to holdings that have never entered the Protocol at all. The Office of the Registrar favours the first reading and has done so consistently since Cycle 733; the Office of Delineation favours the second and has done so, less consistently, since somewhat before.

"A holding may be dual-foliated without being held, and held without being dual-foliated, and both states are lawful, though the second is unwise."

— Memorandum of the Office of Delineation to the Registrar, undated, folder 12

The practical consequence is that a clerk uncertain of the status of a volume can generally find a citation supporting whichever answer they prefer. This is understood within the order as a feature of the Protocol rather than a defect in it, and is cited in Clause 911 as an example of what the Concordances call "stable indeterminacy."

Reverification and closure

Holding is not permanent. The filing of a Notice of Scheduled Dimming against a held volume triggers a Scheduled Reverification Protocol, which reassesses the axiomatic integrity of the holding against the criteria of the original adverse finding. Where reverification finds the finding sound, the holding continues; where it finds the finding unsound, the volume is returned to ordinary shelving and the folio is retired. Where reverification cannot be completed — because the volume has been mislaid, because the original finding was recorded in a hand no longer legible, or because the reader holding the volume has not returned it — the Protocol provides for Security Protocol Sigma to be applied and the case to remain open.

Termination of the Protocol on a specific holding is certified by Terminal Certification, which requires the Scriptorium Affidavit of Terminal Exhaustion and a countersignature. Certifications have occasionally been issued without the affidavit, most notoriously on Floor 450, where a whole shelf was certified closed in the winter of the year the Eastern Stairwell flooded and the paperwork was, by general agreement, not the priority. The shelf has since been reopened and reclosed twice. It is currently open. Visitors are asked not to reshelve it.