Librarians' Chamber of Review

Constitution and Standing

The Librarians' Chamber of Review is a standing body of the Librarians convened for the purpose of examining records that have been reviewed before. It is distinct from the Review Chamber on Floor 1801, with which it is persistently confused, and from the Third Chamber of Review, which hears appellate cataloguing disputes but has no jurisdiction over documents the Librarians' Chamber has already declined to look at twice.

The Chamber was constituted under Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, which fixed its complement at eleven members and its quorum at nine. Annex 2 was superseded by Twenty-Second Concordance, Article 6, which fixed the quorum at four and added the proviso that no meeting is valid unless a member who has read the document in question is present. No provision for selecting that member was made, and the Chamber met irregularly between the winters of 4406 and 4413 as a result.

The Rule of Prior Review

The Chamber's remit derives from the principle of prior review: a document may be reviewed any number of times provided that the number is never the same twice in succession. This is the origin of the Chamber's celebrated "two-step" — the practice of passing a file to Office of Supersession Review before returning it to the Chamber, thereby ensuring that consecutive reviews are performed by different bodies and the prohibition is observed in the letter while being defeated entirely in substance. The Chamber of Coincident Jurisprudence has ruled the two-step lawful on four occasions and improper on three, without distinguishing between them in writing.

"A review performed is a review discharged. That the same page passes twice beneath the same eye is a matter for the eye."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7

Against this, the Quarterly Review of Archival Vigilance observed in its issue of the eleventh quarter, 4419, that Annex 2 had never been applied to eyes specifically, and that the Concordance's silence on the organ of review was "a silence the Chamber has found convenient."

Procedure and the Deposit

Matters come before the Chamber by petition, lodged in the Review Chamber and collected thence on the third day of each week by a Clerk of the Second Ledger. Petitions are numbered in the order in which they are refused, not received, a system introduced by Clerk Anselm Vey during his tenure (4401–4428) and never rescinded. Vey's grievance, recorded in the marginalia of his copy of the Eleventh Concordance, was that his predecessor had numbered by receipt and thereby assigned him a run of eleven thousand petitions in a single afternoon. The Chamber upheld his method in 4404; the number of petitions refused has since been taken as the Chamber's principal measure of diligence.

Pre-Review Documentation must be physically deposited before any petition is heard, per the standing rule recorded at Pre-Review Documentation. The Chamber added its own requirement in 4416 that the deposit be made by a person other than the petitioner, which has led to the practice of the "walking deposit" — a petitioner's associate carrying the bundle to the desk and returning it to the petitioner's own hands moments later. The Chamber has not commented on the practice.

Jurisdictional Disputes

The Chamber's longest quarrel is with the Hall of Perpetual Review, which maintains that its own designation (perpetual) grants it precedence over any chamber whose review is merely repeated. The Chamber holds the opposite, arguing that a perpetual review is a single review that never concludes, whereas its own is a series of concluded reviews, each of which has produced a decision — namely, that no decision is required. Both positions were referred to the Doctrinal Review of 4423, which returned them without opinion on the ground that it had already reviewed them.

A second dispute concerns the Forty Seventh Floor, where the Chamber maintains a reading room for documents too voluminous to be carried. The Chamber of Provisional Contradiction has contested the room's existence on the ground that no deposit record survives for the floor itself. The Chamber's response, filed in 4431, was that it has read documents there and therefore the floor is present; the Contradiction Chamber replied that presence is not a category the floor has ever claimed. The appeal is pending, and has been pending through four sittings of the Quinquennial Review.

Relations with Other Bodies

The Chamber sits within the appellate hierarchy beneath the Review Chamber, from which it may be appealed to, and above the Chamber of Provisional Contradiction, whose findings it may confirm without reading. Appeals following Amendment 47 were briefly routed to the Librarians' Adjudication Chamber, an office the Librarians' Chamber has never recognised and to which it returns all correspondence unopened, tied with the original string.

The Chamber of Verified Function verifies the authority to preside over a Review Chamber; the Librarians' Chamber has twice declined verification, on the reasoning that a body which reviews reviews is not required to have its own function verified, only witnessed. The witness of the Chamber's sittings is a junior clerk who is not permitted to sit, speak, or record, but must remain present for the full duration. In 4427 this clerk, one Perrin Ostell, remained present for nine hours after the Chamber had adjourned without notice to him, and subsequently petitioned for the cost of his supper. The petition was refused under the numbering system, which was felt to be fitting.

Records and the Disagreement of the Concordances

The Chamber's minutes are held on Floor 1801 alongside the Winnowed Manuscript, though the Chamber has never confirmed whether it has read the Manuscript or merely reviewed the question of its reading. Judicial Review of the Archives has twice requested the minutes and been sent, on both occasions, the minutes of the request itself.

Scholars remain divided on whether the Chamber's founding instrument is the Ninth Concordance or the Twenty-Second. The Ninth establishes the body; the Twenty-Second establishes the quorum; the Forty-Fourth Concordance establishes that whichever Concordance establishes a body is to be taken as establishing it retroactively, which has encouraged the view that the Chamber was never founded at all and has merely been in continuous session since before its own constitution. The Chamber's own position, stated once in 4398 and never since, is that it was constituted when it first met and has been meeting ever since, and that no further precision is available or wanted.