Inventory and Cataloguing Phase

The Inventory and Cataloguing Phase is the first operative stage of an Aperture Cycle, preceding the Consolidation Phase and the subsequent Integration Phase. It is defined in the Concordance of Acquisition, Clause 4.1, as "the systematic enumeration, description, and entry of floors, holdings, and occupants into the active register, whether or not such floors are presently reachable." Phase Alpha of any Aperture Cycle commences upon the formal ratification of an Inventory and Cataloguing Phase by a panel of three Senior Librarians; no cycle may proceed to Consolidation until the panel has sealed the enumeration, a seal which is not infrequently applied to enumerations the panel has not read.

The Phase is distinguished from a plain Inventory by the presence of cataloguing: the Inventory records that a thing is present, while the Cataloguing Phase records what the thing is understood to be. The two have never been fully reconciled, and the Bureau of Paradoxical Inventory maintains a standing note that a given floor may be correctly inventoried and incorrectly catalogued at the same time, a condition it describes as "stable."

Conduct of the Phase

Field survey is ordinarily entrusted to a survey team led by a Curator, whose brief includes the numbering of unnumbered landings, the sampling of inscriptions, and the compilation of the working inventory in duplicate. The Cataloguing Amp — a portable recording instrument described elsewhere as a chief example of the tools employed in Inventory Amp Cataloguing — is carried by the second surveyor, who is responsible for its winding and for carrying it. Survey parties conventionally descend rather than ascend, on the grounds that an inventory compiled downward can be reversed, whereas one compiled upward cannot.

The phase closes with the inscription of the working inventory under Clause 12.7 of the Concordance of Acquisition, which governs how material gathered immediately before a Stillness Phase must be written up. Clause 12.7 has been amended nine times and its current recension requires the inventory to be inscribed "in a hand that shall not be the hand of the compiler," a provision that has generated more delay than any other in the Phase. The School of Ephemeral Cataloguing has petitioned four times for exemption, arguing that its Ephemeral Gradients system renders the provision meaningless; the petitions have been received and filed, which is not the same as granted.

Historical applications

The largest-scale application of the Phase 5 protocols was Re-Mapping & Re-Cataloguing Phase III, a re-survey of several hundred mid-level floors conducted under the Cartographer-Scribes. Its logistical difficulties led directly to the formalization of TCAR, and the Cataloguing Amp was formally integrated into its protocols partway through. Those who maintain that the Phase is a recent invention are directed to the earlier recension of that designation, which records a partial inventory of the same floors compiled some two centuries previously and never reconciled with the later one.

Smaller applications are continuous. Floors discovered during an Auditory Phase are held over to the next Inventory and Cataloguing Phase rather than catalogued in place; the practice dates from an incident on a low landing in the winter of 23-994, when a surveyor catalogued a floor by sound alone and it was later found to be a stairwell. The stairwell has since been inventoried twice and catalogued once.

Disputed interpretation

Scholarly dispute centres on whether the Phase describes a procedure or a condition. Elara of the Dusted Stacks advanced a gloss arguing for a metaphorical interpretation of Phase 7 of the Material Inventory, and while her gloss addressed a different instrument, its reasoning has been applied to the present subject by extension, chiefly by those who have not read it. The opposing view rests on Amendment 43-b, which first codified The Principle of Latent Cataloguing and thereby established that a thing may be catalogued before it is found — or, in the Amendment's own words, "that the entry may precede the floor."

"The entry may precede the floor; the floor may not precede the number; the number may not be revised."

— Amendment 43-b, Clause 2

The Verification Phase has declined to rule on which reading governs, observing in a minute of 24-011 that both readings produce identical registers and that the question is therefore "of interest to no one but its authors." Authors have continued to be interested.

Records and returns

The Phase returns its registers to the Office of Acquisitions, which holds them in triplicate. The triplicate is a formality retained from a period when registers were copied by lamplight; since the introduction of Phase 2, no collation of the three copies has been required, and discrepancies between them are resolved in favour of the copy held lowest. Visiting surveyors should note that the archive does not permit the removal of a register from its floor of filing, and that the lift will not stop at a floor for the purpose of consulting one.

Pending enumerations are listed in the register of the Bureau of Paradoxical Inventory and in the returns of the Verification Phase; a register under seal is not available to either office, nor to its own compilers, until the seal is lifted by the panel that applied it.

Phase designation

Phase Alpha of an Aperture Cycle; commonly cited as Phase 1.

Governing instrument

Concordance of Acquisition, Clauses 4.1 and 12.7.

Reporting authority

Office of Acquisitions; triplicate registers.

Precedes

Consolidation Phase; on failure to seal, see Post-Incident Review.