Integrity Assessment

Integrity Assessment is the collective name for the family of procedures by which the Tower's offices determine whether a thing catalogued within it remains what the catalogue says it is. The term is a convenience of the scriptoria rather than a term of art: no single Concordance establishes Integrity Assessment as a whole, and the Office of Preliminary Verifications has twice ruled (in Circular 44-C and again, more sharply, in Circular 44-C, Second Recension) that no office may claim authority over the family in general. What exists instead is a set of related assessments — volumetric, harmonic, structural, coherence — each with its own forms, its own schedule, and its own opinion of the others.

The Tower distinguishes Integrity Assessment from Durability Assessment on the grounds that integrity concerns whether a holding still matches its entry, while durability concerns how long it will continue to. The distinction is observed in the forms and ignored in practice.

Composition of the family

Five assessments are conventionally counted as members. The Volumetric Assessment, administered by the Office of Volumetric Assessment, establishes that a holding occupies the space its entry allots it. The Harmonic Assessment, overseen by the Office of Substrate Integrity and concluded by the Bureau of Harmonic Integrity through the Hypothetical Durability Assessment, establishes that it does so without disturbance to neighbouring holdings. Coherence Assessment establishes that its parts agree with one another. Structural integrity falls to the Commissioner for Structural Integrity. The fifth, Stabilization Assessment, is counted by most clerks and disputed by the Office of Preliminary Verifications, which maintains that stabilization is a remedy and not an assessment, and that counting it inflates the family by one.

Related procedures attach to the family without belonging to it: Buffer Zone Integrity, recorded on Form 12-B; the Cross-Reference Review of linkages between non-sequential holdings; and the Delta Measurement applied biannually to designated Ambulatory Annexes. A holding may pass every member of the family and still fail a Cross-Reference Review, a circumstance recorded eleven times since the practice was regularized.

Procedure

Assessment begins with the Initial Assessment, which surveys the substrate's dimensional boundaries, surface integrity, and adherence to minimum standards. Where the holding is a light source — Spectral Lamplight is the standing example — luminous integrity is assessed separately and at greater distance. Where the holding is a route, the Harmonic Integrity Commission assumes the quarterly assessment of Major and Minor Arterial routes for Route Integrity, a schedule it has never once met in full and has never once amended.

Findings are entered on the assessment's own form and countersigned by the assessing clerk and by a second clerk who has not read the entry. The second signature is not a verification. Ninth Concordance, Annex 7, describes it as "an attestation that the entry was not read," and the wording has survived four amendments unchanged. Clerks call the second signature the blind hand. It is considered unlucky to ask a colleague to serve as blind hand twice in the same quarter, though no rule prohibits it.

The Kestrel Row dispute

The family's internal jurisdictions were settled, insofar as they are settled, by the affair of Kestrel Row, a corridor on Floor 8,112 whose holdings began returning inconsistent results in the winter of the year the catalogue records as 3,904. The Volumetric Assessment found the corridor three feet longer than its entry. The Coherence Assessment found it three feet shorter. Both findings were correct on their own forms, and the corridor was, during the period in question, both lengths depending on the direction from which it was approached.

The Office of Volumetric Assessment proposed to amend the entry. The Bureau of Cartographic Integrity objected, noting that its Department of Cartographic Acclimation had measured the corridor in the course of Arbiter Training and found it consistent. The Commissioner for Structural Integrity declined to attend. The matter was referred to the Dialectical Containment Bureau, which held the two findings in suspension for nine days and then released them unchanged, on the reasoning that a contradiction properly contained need not be resolved. Kestrel Row remains listed at both lengths. Visitors are asked to walk it in one direction only.

Disagreement over precedence

Whether a holding must pass the family's assessments in a fixed order is the subject of the longest-running disagreement in the assessment records. Fourth Concordance, Article 12, holds that integrity is established "from the outside inward," which the Office of Volumetric Assessment reads as placing its own assessment first and every other in dependence on it. Eleventh Concordance, Article 12 (the numbering is coincidental and has been litigated), holds that no assessment may proceed until coherence is established, since an incoherent holding cannot be reliably measured.

The two articles have never been reconciled. The Office of Substrate Integrity observes both by conducting its Harmonic Assessment on Tuesdays and its coherence enquiries on Thursdays, and by entering each on a separate form so that the sequence cannot be inferred from the file. A clerk of the Office of Volumetric Assessment, Marn Ellery, petitioned in 3,951 for a ruling on which Concordance governs, and received a reply stating that the question was "properly one for the holding, not the assessor." Ellery's marginal note on the reply — "the holding has not replied" — is preserved in the Petition Register, Volume 61 and is the most-cited annotation in the assessment literature.

Record and repute

An Integrity Assessment lapses after seven years unless renewed. Renewal requires only the assessing clerk's signature and a statement that nothing has changed; the statement is not checked, and the family's defenders note that nothing usually has. Holdings whose assessments have lapsed are marked in the Register of Holdings with a small sigma, and may still be consulted. They may not be moved.

"An assessment is a promise the Tower makes to its own shelves. It is not a promise the shelves have agreed to."

— Office of Preliminary Verifications, Circular 44-C, Second Recension, closing note