Initial Validation

Definition and scope

Initial Validation is the first substantive review to which a proposed subject is subjected prior to its admission into the catalogue proper. It is distinguished from Pre-Validation — which concerns the completeness of the submission dossier — and from Recursive Validation, which concerns the subject's capacity to undergo review repeatedly without loss of internal coherence. Initial Validation determines only one thing: whether the subject, as submitted, is sufficiently self-consistent to be worth cataloguing at all.

The procedure is set out in Clause 3 of the Validation Pathway and is executed under the supervision of a Triaging Officer. Subjects failing Initial Validation are returned to the submitting floor with a notation and, in most cases, a small quantity of graphite.

Historical development

Before the standardisation of the Validation Chain, Initial Validation was conducted ad hoc by whichever Librarian happened to be nearest the ingress point. This produced considerable inconsistency; the Archive records three floors whose subjects were validated in a single afternoon by a clerk who was later found to have been asleep for most of it. The Second Concordance consolidated the procedure, and the Bureau of Ingress Validation was subsequently granted authority to issue Provisional Validation Certificates only upon its completion.

The current practice dates from the 4th Edition of the Manual of Validation Procedure, which defines validation generally as "a certification of internal consistency and not of correspondence."¹ This wording has been the subject of dispute ever since, since it is unclear what the subject is said to correspond with, and the question of correspondence has been ruled out of order twice by the Third Concordance.

Stages of the review

Initial Validation proceeds in four movements, each recorded separately in the Chain Sequence Number assigned to the submission:

• the reading of the subject aloud in full, to establish that it can be spoken;
• the measurement of its interior distances, by the Bureau of Registry;
• the identification of any feature which the subject itself denies possessing;
• the affixing of the Validation Amp Matriculation mark, or its refusal.

Failure at any movement halts the review. In practice, the third movement accounts for the majority of rejections: a great many submitted subjects, when asked directly, deny the very property for which they were submitted. Officers are instructed to note such denials without argument.

Disputed boundaries

The principal disagreement concerns whether Initial Validation terminates at the affixing of the mark or continues until the subject has been re-read. The Bureau of Recursive Validation maintains, on the authority of the Precept of Recursive Validation, that a review which cannot be re-entered was never completed; the Bureau of Ingress Validation counters that re-entry is a property of the Amp, not of the reviewer, and that the two questions are severable. The Directorate of Validation & Verification has, to date, declined to rule, noting in its single published comment that "the Bureau's respective positions are both procedurally defensible, which is the difficulty."

A narrower dispute attaches to subjects submitted during the winter quarters, when interior distances contract. Officers on the lower floors have reported that subjects which passed Initial Validation in the spring fail the same measurement in the winter by margins of two or three spans, only to pass again by midsummer. The Fourth Concordance attributes this to "seasonal elasticity of the non-extant" and declines further comment.

Relation to subsequent phases

Completion of Initial Validation permits the submission to advance to Phase 3: Initial Assessment and, where applicable, to Procedural Anomaly Validation. It does not by itself confer catalogued status; that requires the full Validation Chain and the countersignature of the Bureau. Subjects which pass Initial Validation and then fail at a later stage are the subject of a standing grievance on floors 340 through 366, where officers hold that "a subject told it is consistent will not forgive being told otherwise."

Records of completed Initial Validations are held in the Bureau of Registry under their Chain Sequence Numbers and are available on request, though the request itself is subject to Pre-Validation.

"Initial Validation is not a judgment of the subject. It is a judgment of the submission, and only of the submission."

— Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Edition, §12

¹ Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Edition, §1. See also The Validation Chain.