Ninth Ingress Protocol

The Ninth Ingress Protocol is the registration instrument under which Librarians-At-Large are entered onto the standing rolls, and the only one of the numbered Ingress Protocols whose scope has never been formally closed. It was ratified in the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the Concordance of Records, and it superseded the Eighth Ingress Protocol in every particular except the registration of Celia, whose entry was carried forward without interruption and whose file number remains the eighth-protocol number to this day. It is the instrument most often cited in disputes about who counts as present.

Origin and ratification

The Protocol arose from an administrative embarrassment rather than a principle. Under the Eighth Protocol, Librarians-At-Large were registered at the point of departure and again at the point of return, and the rolls for the interval between the two were kept by whoever happened to be holding them. Between 4,089 and 4,112 the interval rolls were lost four times, once to damp on a floor designated only by its spiral marking, and once to a clerk who took them home and could not afterwards say where home was. The Standing Committee on Registry Gaps reported in 4,110 that an unknown but substantial number of Librarians-At-Large had been, in the Committee's phrase, "present in fact and absent on paper."

The Ninth Protocol replaced the two-point registration with a single continuous entry, renewed by the Librarian-At-Large at intervals of not more than eleven floors. The figure of eleven is not explained in the ratified text; the Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, asserts that it was chosen because the drafting subcommittee could agree on no other number, and that the alternative under discussion had been three.

Registration of Librarians-At-Large

The Protocol's substantive clauses are short and its schedules are not. A Librarian-At-Large is entered on the rolls under a registration line containing the name, the sponsoring reading room, the floor of first instruction, and an aperture marking — a two-letter designation that records which vertical shaft the Librarian is expected to use when summoned downward. The aperture marking is not a prohibition and does not prevent the use of other shafts. Librarians are asked not to climb between floors during the sounding of the noon bell, as the counting is done by ear.

Registration under the Ninth Protocol is distinct from Priority Ingress, which governs the order in which ingress points are opened and which is itself administered under the Manual of Ingress. The two instruments are frequently confused because both use the word priority to mean different things: in the Protocol it means seniority on the rolls, and in the Manual it means the precedence of one aperture over another. The Bureau of Ingress Validation has declined, on three separate petitions, to reconcile the usages, holding in each case that the words "are not the same word."

Relationship to the Concordances

The Protocol's authority derives from the Ninth Concordance, which ratified the position of Protocol Delta as encompassing Protocol Gamma and, in the same instrument, confirmed the Ninth Ingress Protocol's standing without restating its terms. This is the source of the longest-running dispute in the registry literature.

The School of Continuous Registry holds that the Protocol is therefore self-amending, since the Ninth Concordance confirmed it without restating it, and a thing confirmed without restatement must be presumed to contain whatever it needs to remain in force. The School of the Closed Roll holds the opposite: that confirmation without restatement freezes the text at the moment of ratification, and that every subsequent amendment to the Protocol is void for want of a confirming recension. The dispute has produced eleven recensions of the Protocol's schedules, of which nine are in circulation and two are sealed.

"A roll that may amend itself is not a roll but a conversation, and conversations are not admitted as evidence before this Committee."

— Standing Committee on Registry Gaps, Minutes of 4,147, item 12

The Committee's own practice contradicts its minutes. It has admitted the Eleventh Recension of the Ninth Ingress Protocol as evidence in every year since 4,150.

The Celia entry and the anomaly of 4,163

The most studied single line on the rolls is that of Celia, registered as a Librarian-At-Large under the Ninth Ingress Protocol and carried forward from the Eighth. In 4,163 a clerk of the registry, Aumary Steld, noticed that Celia's aperture marking had been entered twice — once in the eighth-protocol hand and once in the ninth — and that the two markings did not agree. Steld requested a ruling on which marking governed. The request was logged, forwarded, and logged again, and in the course of forwarding was entered under Ingress Logging rather than under registration.

This misentry had consequences. Because the matter entered the logging stream, it was subjected to Ingress Amp Isolation under Section 8.3 of the Manual of Ingress, and Celia's registration line was for a period of nine floors treated as a provisional phenomenon under the Provisional Logging Protocol and logged as Class Gamma Provisional Amp Unvalidated. The classification was reversed in 4,166 by a Fade Assessment Amp Restoration review, which found that a registration line is not an ingress site and cannot emit anything. Steld's original request was never answered. He is recorded as having transferred to the Department of Unanswered Requests in 4,168, where he is said to have risen quickly.

Criticism and the unfinished scope

Critics of the Protocol observe that its scope clause, Schedule B, closes with the words "and all further classes of presence not otherwise provided for," a formula broad enough to register anyone. The Bureau of Registry has used Schedule B exactly once, in 4,171, to register a reading room itself as a Librarian-At-Large. The room, Reading Room 44-West, has since been summoned downward twice and has not attended either summons. Its attendance is recorded as pending.

Defenders reply that the alternative is the Eighth Protocol, and point to the interval rolls. The Protocol was last amended in 4,189, by the addition of a single clause requiring that registration lines be written in ink of a single colour. The reason for the clause is not recorded, but the Ninth Concordance's annotations suggest an incident involving a very long roll and two clerks who disagreed about blue.