Log of Reintegration

The Log of Reintegration is the bound serial record maintained by the Guild of Exactitude at which every reconditioned document returned to the Vault is entered, numbered, and witnessed. Its function is evidentiary rather than narrative: the Log does not describe what a document says, only that it has been returned, in what condition, and under whose hand. Entries are made in iron-gall ink on laid stock of 112 gsm, two to a folio, and are closed to amendment once the witnessing Librarian has applied the seal of the Office of Harmonic Integrity. Since the reorganization of the Vault returns in the winter of the ninth centennial, the Log has been the sole instrument by which the Tower establishes that a document exists in the Vault at all rather than merely being believed to.

Origins and the numbering anomaly

The Log was instituted under clause 14 of the Third Concordance, which provides that "no work shall re-enter the Vault unrecorded, nor be recorded twice." The second prohibition has proved the more burdensome. Because the numbers assigned to Log entries follow neither the order of return nor the floor of deposit, the same document is frequently entered twice under two different numbers, and the Guild has declined for four centuries to say which entry is the true one. The accepted practice is to retain both and mark the later with a small superscript b, a convention that has itself been entered three times.

Entry 4,092 illustrates the difficulty. It records the return of a single folio of no particular distinction, then a marginal note in a second hand reads "see also 1,617," which records the same folio, and beneath that "see also 1,617b," which does not exist. The Guild's Calibration Annex cites the entry as a model of exhaustive cross-reference.

Procedure on return

A document arriving from Harmonic Reintegration is presented at the Returns Desk with its Reconstructed Vellum wrapper intact. The desk clerk verifies the sigil, weighs the wrapper, and enters the date by the Vault's own reckoning, which runs eleven days behind the upper floors and has never been reconciled. The document then passes to a witnessing Librarian, who reads the first and last leaves only. Reading the intervening leaves is not forbidden but is understood to compromise the witness's impartiality, and no witness who has done so may seal an entry for a period of ninety days.

Where the wrapper is absent or the sigil illegible, the return is entered instead in the Log of Unresolved Awakenings and the Log of Reintegration is not opened. Clerks are instructed to keep the two volumes on separate shelves, which they do, although both shelves are in the same room.

"An entry sealed is an entry true. An entry unsealed is a question, and questions belong in the other book."

— Standing Instruction 9, Returns Desk, Guild of Exactitude

The dispute over seasonal entries

Ordinance AAR-12 requires a Seasonal Reintegration of curated ampoules during the biannual ventilation cycle, and a minority reading holds that each such ampoule constitutes a return and must therefore be logged individually. The Guild of Exactitude rejects this reading, maintaining that ampoules are curated rather than returned and that logging them would swell the Log by some nine thousand entries a season. The Office of Harmonic Integrity has declined to intervene, noting that the disagreement has not yet produced a Cadential Breach and that the Office is not a registry of quotas.

The dissenting view was set out at length by Archivist Melworth Dray in 4,411, who logged the ampoules anyway, by hand, in a supplementary quire now bound at the rear of the volume. Dray's quire is regarded as irregular and is not consulted, except by everyone. His grievance against the Returns Desk — that it had "confused a curation with a courtesy" — is recorded nowhere but is quoted constantly.

Relation to the Log of Reintegration elsewhere

The Log should not be confused with the entries made in the Log of Reintegration of the Gallery of Superfluous Marks, a separate and shorter series kept when documents reduced to Archival Dust by Script-Moths are reconstituted for audit. The Gallery's series is entitled identically and bound identically, and the two were stored together for sixty years following the ventilation collapse of the lower scriptorium. Separation was ordered by the Master Log of Amendments in an annex that has since been superseded twice, and the volumes remain adjacent on the shelf, which is the arrangement both offices prefer and neither will defend in writing.

Entries in the Gallery's series are marked with a dust notation in the lower margin, a practice codified in Annex Sigma for cases of extreme semantic density. The notation is small. It has been missed.

Current custody

The Log is held on Floor 9 in the Returns Room, a chamber of moderate height with a north window and a single bench. It may be consulted by any Librarian on production of a witnessed slip, and by others on production of two. The volume is not to be removed from the room, and the room is not to be ventilated during a Seasonal Reintegration, as the draft turns the pages and the seal of a closed entry is then difficult to distinguish from an open one. A copy of the Log's first two hundred folios, made in the eleventh centennial and corrected in a later hand, is held in the annex off the north stair and is preferred by some readers on the grounds that it is shorter.