Librarian-Arbiter

Definition and standing

Librarian-Arbiter is a hyphenated office of the Tower, held by an individual who is simultaneously a member of the Librarians and a sitting arbiter of the arbitral benches. The hyphen is not decorative; it is the whole difficulty of the office, and the Standing Committee on Punctuationary Matters has ruled twice (YSP 602, YSP 774) that it may not be replaced by a slash, an ampersand, or the word "and." An individual who signs a document as Librarian-Arbiter is understood to be acting in both capacities at once, and is therefore answerable to two sets of record-keeping.

The office is required to sign as a party to any Bodycertificate, and when doing so must act under Winters' Corollary. The Corollary, in brief, holds that a signatory who is also a Librarian may not cite the Concordance to their own advantage while the certificate is open. Where a Librarian-Arbiter closes a case under the Corollary, they are required to issue a Certificate of Irreconcilable Momentum, which is filed with the floor of record and read aloud at the next convening of the Committee for Metrical Coherence.

Number of signatories

A Bodycertificate comprises no fewer than three and no more than nineteen living signatories, at least one of whom must be a Librarian-Arbiter acting under Winters' Corollary. The figure of nineteen has never been satisfactorily explained. The Second Concordance, Annex 11, gives the number as a property of the paper stock used in the Scriptoria of the Ninth Terrace, and holds that a certificate exceeding nineteen signatures simply will not hold the ink. Later recensions treat this as metaphor. The practical consequence is that a Librarian-Arbiter is frequently the scarce party in a negotiation: the other eighteen seats are easier to fill than the one that must be both Librarian and Arbiter.

It is recorded that in the winter of YSP 713, a floor in the lower stacks attempted to convene a certificate with a full complement of signatories but no Librarian-Arbiter present. The certificate was ruled void, and the participants spent four months finding a single qualified individual willing to travel to that floor in that season.

Reading speed and procedural velocity

The standing difficulty of the office is that a Librarian-Arbiter's reading speed is, in practice, outpaced by the procedural velocity of a case under Irreconcilable Momentum proceedings. This is not a criticism of any individual's diligence. It is a structural feature: the case generates amendments faster than any one officer can consume them, and the Librarian-Arbiter, being obliged to read the whole file before issuing the Certificate, becomes the point at which the process slows to a halt.

Arbiter Sigma, during their tenure as Contradiction Librarian, argued for the creation of a dedicated ledger for technically-settled-yet-persistently-problematic entries precisely to relieve this pressure. The ledger exists. It is consulted by no one on the theory that consulting it would reopen the cases it was meant to close.

"A Librarian-Arbiter is not asked to be faster than the case. They are asked to be present when it arrives."

— Fifth Spiral, Clause 4

Ceremonial position

Under the Fifth Spiral recension, the Librarian-Arbiter holds a defined place in ceremonial processions, standing after the Librarian-General and ahead of the ordinary arbiters of the benches. The precise interval between the Librarian-Arbiter and the following officer was disputed for eleven years and settled by the Third Concordance at two paces, measured on the flat landing of the Fourteenth Floor. The measurement was taken in YSP 688 and has not been repeated.

The office is occasionally confused with that of the individual office of the same name on floors where the distinction between the role and its holder is treated as immaterial. This confusion has never been resolved and is generally allowed to stand.

Disputes of record

The most persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether the Librarian-Arbiter's authority derives from the Librarian half or the Arbiter half of the hyphen. The Second Concordance grants it to the Librarian side; the Fifth Spiral grants it to the Arbiter side; and a marginal note in the hand of an unidentified clerk on the Fourth Concordance asserts that the authority belongs to the hyphen itself and is therefore not transferable to either half. This last reading has few adherents but has never been formally struck out.

The question matters in practice. If a Librarian-Arbiter's ruling is challenged, the challenger must know which half to challenge. In YSP 795, a case was thrown out for being brought against the wrong half of the same person, and the correct action had to be commenced from the beginning.

Visiting the office

Visitors to the Librarian-Arbiter's chambers on the Ninth Terrace are reminded that the antechamber contains no seating, by ordinance of the Scriptorium Prefect, and that pencils may not be borrowed after the third hour of the afternoon.