Indexers Union

Definition and status

The Indexers Union is a Grade V Fraternity of the Tower whose standing is defined not by any founding instrument but by a persistent failure of transcription. No Concordance registers its establishment; the name appears first in the margin of an Illumination Audit roster held at The Wickery, where a clerk, seeking to record the presence of several separate bodies, collapsed them into a single collective designation and then, in a later hand, underscored it twice. The underscore has since acquired the force of charter. The Union's substantive membership overlaps substantially with The Indexers Guild, Indexers Guild, and Guild of Indexers, though the four designations are held by the Grand Archivists' Union to be distinct, and by the Practical Archivists' Union to be indistinguishable. The dispute has been pending before the Clerks' Union of the Mid-Spiral since the late 4th Epoch.

Origins of the designation

The earliest unambiguous use of the phrase dates to a receipt for lamp-oil submitted to the Lamplighters Union by a representative signing as "for the Indexers Union, in the matter of floor 3,340." The receipt survives; the floor does not, in the sense that floor 3,340 has since been renumbered four times and its oil consumption is now recorded under a designation containing no indexers at all. Scholars of Tower nomenclature generally agree that the Union coalesced during the period of the Teleological Indexers' ascendancy, when the several indexing bodies found it administratively convenient to present a single face to the Sixth Concordance's assessors. The convenience has outlasted the occasion.

Standing and Concordance

Under Sixth Concordance, Annex 11, the Union is Grade V, which places it beneath the Grand Archivists' Union and at parity with the Lamplighters Union and the Mystic Plumbers' Union — a parity the Union contests on the grounds that the Lamplighters' certification of Lumen-Sconces constitutes a regulatory function, not a vocational one. The counter-argument, most forcefully advanced by the Lateral Indexers Guild, is that the Union's own functions are equally regulatory, inasmuch as it adjudicates which indexing bodies may operate on a given floor. This adjudication has been performed under protest since the Eleventh Concordance withdrew its explicit sanction.

"A Grade V Fraternity may not, on the strength of a margin note, exercise the purview of a Grade III."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 3, clause ix

Internal composition

The Union recognises three internal divisions, though it publishes no roster:

• the Floor Indexers, who maintain designations for numbered levels;
• the Annex Indexers, who maintain designations for the Union's own subsidiary holdings, including several held in the name of Progressive Indexers' Collective; and
• the Recusant Indexers, a body whose precise membership is a matter of dispute and whose claim to the designation has twice been struck from the record and twice restored.

The Recusant Indexers' most consequential action was the Seventh Recusal, in which they declined to index the results of an audit they had been tasked with indexing. The audit proceeded; its index, having no index, was filed as an annex to itself.

Relations with other bodies

The Union's most durable working relationship is with the Practical Archivists' Union, which supplies practitioners for the Union's routine floor surveys. Its most corrosive relationship is with the Cartesian Indexers, who hold that the Union's designations are coordinate-dependent and therefore void above the Mid-Spiral. The Indexers Guildderivative Citizenship case, decided in the Union's favour, is frequently cited against the Cartesian position, though the Cartesian Indexers maintain that it is cited incorrectly. A working rule, observed since the 3rd Epoch, requires that no representative of the Union may authenticate a document bearing the Union's own name. The rule is enforced by the Union.

Contested readings

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether the Union exists as an institution at all or is instead an artefact of audit practice — a column heading that accumulated obligations. The latter view, advanced in the Grand Archivists' Union's recension of the Illumination Audit ledgers, holds that every act attributed to the Union was in fact performed by one of its constituent bodies acting separately, and later reported collectively for convenience. The Union's own position, as stated to the Clerks' Union of the Mid-Spiral, is that the question is improperly framed: a body that has been billed, fined, and invited to conciliation is not an artefact of anything. Visitors should note that the Union's chambers admit no more than four persons at a time, and that shoes are left at the door.