Non-Intervening Preservation

Non-Intervening Preservation is the foundational doctrine of custodial practice in the Tower, codified at the head of the Manual of Custodial Protocol and administered in its daily application by the Custodial Corps. In its simplest recension the doctrine holds that a custodian's duty is to maintain the state of a holding, or of an environment containing holdings, without altering its substance or its provenance. The custodian is therefore present at every stage of a holding's life and absent from every stage of its change. The doctrine is not a prohibition on care; it is a prohibition on improvement.

Formulation and recensions

The doctrine first appears as a marginal gloss in the second recension of the Manual of Custodial Protocol, where it is attached to a schedule of stairwell inventories and appears to have been written to settle a dispute about dust. The gloss reads, in the earliest surviving hand: "Let the dust lie where it has fallen, and record where it has fallen." The Custodial Corps adopted the phrasing without amendment at the Collation of 44-Δ and has defended it, largely unchanged, through forty-one subsequent revisions of the Manual.

The doctrine is conventionally read alongside the Doctrine of Invisible Stewardship, with which it shares a chapter in Manual of Custodial Protocol. The two are frequently confused by junior custodians. Invisible Stewardship describes the custodian's relation to the reader; Non-Intervening Preservation describes the custodian's relation to the object. A holding may be perfectly stewarded and poorly preserved, or the reverse, and the Corps maintains separate registers for each failure.

Application

In practice the doctrine governs the treatment of all holdings received by the Custodial Corps, including the fully documented hydrographic objects transferred to it under standing arrangement with the hydrographic desks. A vessel received with water in it is preserved with water in it. A vessel received dry is not subsequently wetted. Where a holding deteriorates in storage, the custodian records the deterioration at each inspection and takes no step to arrest it, on the reasoning that the deteriorated state is itself a state of the holding and therefore within the doctrine's protection.

The Corps' inspection schedule requires that each holding be examined at intervals not exceeding ninety days and that the examiner's hand be recorded in the margin of the holding's Correlative Index entry. Examiners are issued gloves, a stylus, and a small brush, of which the brush may be used on the examiner.

The Trellick grievance

The doctrine's most cited controversy concerns Clerk-Adjunct Mira Trellick, who in the winter of 61-Δ observed mould spreading across the bindings of sixty-two volumes in a sub-gallery of the Lucid Vault and, acting on the ordinary instinct of a custodial officer, wiped them. Her report of the following morning was returned unopened and accompanied by a formal notice of interference. Trellick argued before the Architectural Preservation Guild that a binding consumed by mould ceases to be a binding and that preservation of the holding therefore required the mould's removal. The Guild found against her, observing that the doctrine protects the holding as received and does not guarantee that a holding will remain a holding. Trellick was reassigned to the Department of Sentimental Residues and is remembered principally for the annotation in her hand, still legible in the Vault's margin: "I have preserved them into disappearance."

The Society for the Preservation of Ambiguity has twice petitioned for Trellick's reinstatement, on the ground that the mould itself was a holding of ambiguous status. Both petitions were refused on procedural grounds without reaching the substance.

Relationship to other doctrines

Non-Intervening Preservation stands in acknowledged tension with the Primacy of Preservation, which holds that all information is to be preserved and which, read strictly, would require a custodian to arrest any loss whatsoever. The Preservation Mandates attempt no reconciliation. Clause 3, amended per the Preservation Mandates of 74-Δ, states only that the two doctrines "shall be applied in the order in which they are remembered," a formula the Seventh Concordance has since described as "an instruction to no one."

Concordance Seven further governs the cataloguing of incomplete and unresolved phenomena, and custodians have long argued that a deteriorating holding is an unresolved phenomenon and thus subject to that Concordance rather than to the Manual. The Custodial Guild rejected this reading in a ruling of 79-Δ, noting that a thing which is merely falling apart is not unresolved but busy.

Documented exceptions

Three exceptions to the doctrine are recognised in writing, and only three. The first permits the removal of a holding that has become a hazard to the gallery, provided the removal is recorded as a hazard. The second permits the correction of a catalogue error touching the holding's floor number, on the ground that the error belongs to the catalogue and not to the holding. The third, granted by Protocol of Benign Neglect and confirmed in Manual of Custodial Protocol, permits a custodian to leave a holding entirely alone for a period of up to one year, during which no inspection is required; the exception was introduced for holdings of exceptional fragility and has been invoked chiefly for holdings of exceptional size.

Disputes over the boundary of the first exception are the most common matter before the Guild. In 83-Δ a sub-gallery was closed for eleven days while custodians debated whether a fallen shelf constituted a hazard to the gallery or merely a change in the gallery's state. The Recursive Buffer Zones adjoining the closed gallery accumulated three hundred and nine unauthorised entries in that period, all of which were recorded.