Integrity Testing

Definition and scope

Integrity Testing is the collective designation for those procedures by which the Tower verifies that a thing catalogued under a given name continues to be the thing that name describes. It is distinguished from Stress Testing in that stress testing asks how much a subject can bear, whereas integrity testing asks whether the subject is still, in the administrative sense, itself. The two are frequently confused at the lower stacks, where the forms are printed on the same stock and differ only in the colour of the border. Integrity Testing forms carry a red border. This is noted on the forms.

The practice is governed jointly by the Bureau of Referential Integrity and the Architectural Integrity Subcommittee, an arrangement that has been described in the Seventh Recension of the Standing Orders as "workable in principle." A schedule of common tests is maintained in the annex to the Eleventh Concordance, which has not been read in full since its amendment in the winter of the year the west stairwell was closed.

The four registers of integrity

Testers recognise four registers in which integrity may be verified: referential, structural, harmonic, and oneiric. Referential integrity concerns whether a subject's citations still resolve. Structural integrity concerns whether it continues to support what rests on it, and is tested under Conceptual Load Testing where the subject is unreal and load-bearing. Harmonic integrity is the concern of the Harmonic Integrity Commission. Oneiric integrity is screened separately and at night, by officers of Oneiric Integrity Screening who do not report their findings at the time.

A subject may fail in one register and pass in another without any inconsistency being recorded, since the registers are said to be "parallel and not cumulative" (Fourteenth Concordance, Annex Beta, clause 9). The practical consequence is that a doorway may be structurally sound, referentially void, and harmonically inadmissible all at once, and the file will show only three ticks and one marginal note in a hand nobody in the office recognises.

The Ohlstrand grievance

The modern form of the procedure dates from the dispute that has come to be known, in the internal correspondence of the Academy of Precursory Law, as the Ohlstrand grievance. In that year a junior assessor, Ohlstrand of the fifth intake, was asked to certify a corridor on Floor 1212 as integral. He did so, and signed the docket in the ordinary way. Within a fortnight the corridor's catalogue entry had been amended four times, each amendment citing Ohlstrand's certificate as evidence that the corridor had not changed. Ohlstrand objected that his certificate had been used to prove the opposite of what he had attested. The objection was upheld, then overturned on appeal, then upheld again in a ruling that did not overturn the overturning but added a note to the file.

"A certificate of integrity attests to the state of the subject at the hour of testing and to nothing thereafter. Officers are reminded that the hour of testing is not a fixed quantity and must be entered by hand."

— Third Concordance, Annex Delta, clause 22

The Academy subsequently required that all integrity tests be witnessed, and that the witness be neither the tester nor, where avoidable, anyone who had read the subject's entry in the preceding year. The Primacy School, whose habit of testing its own filings before submission is well recorded, declined to adopt the witnessing rule and has been in quiet disagreement with the Academy ever since.

Disputed points

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether integrity is a property or a relation. The Bureau of Referential Integrity holds, in its standing circular of the ninth revision, that integrity is relational — that a subject is integral with respect to some other thing, and that the phrase "integral" without an object is an incomplete statement. The Bureau of Architectural Integrity, in its counter-circular, calls this position "unbuildable," noting that no wall can be tested against every load it might one day bear without being tested against none of them.

A second dispute concerns the Nineteenth Concordance, which acknowledged the utility of sanctioned heresies for testing indexing protocols. Whether a sanctioned heresy may be admitted as an integrity test proper, or remains a species of Provocative Testing, is unresolved. The Observatorium of Errant Postulate and the Directorate of Cartographic Review, which administer provocative testing jointly, have each published a commentary on the question that disagrees with the other, and the two commentaries are shelved together.

Procedure and waivers

Testing proceeds by comparison against a reference copy held in the sub-basement of the issuing bureau. The tester reads the subject, then the reference, then the subject again, and records any difference. Where no difference is found, the subject is certified. Where a difference is found but is not material, the tester may issue a Structural Integrity Waiver, which permits the difference to stand until the next scheduled review, provided the difference is written down and the writing is legible.

Where a difference is material, the subject is referred upward, and the testers move on to the next item on the docket. Floor 308 has been referred upward continuously since the practice was instituted, and the docket for that floor is kept in a separate cabinet to prevent it from being reached by ordinary means. The current count of open referrals for the floor is given on the cabinet door in chalk, corrected by hand, and the chalk is not to be removed.

Records

Completed dockets are bound annually and stored by year of testing, not year of subject. The binding is done in the eastern scriptorium, and a bound volume may not be reopened except by an officer of the issuing bureau, or by a Librarian, or by anyone presenting a written reason of fewer than forty words. The forty-word limit was imposed after a reason of some length was presented in the matter of the Ohlstrand corridor and was found, on reading, to constitute a separate and competing certificate.