Office of Chief Archivist

The Office of Chief Archivist (OCA) is the principal administrative and archival body of the Tower, charged with the maintenance, verification, and canonical organization of the corpus of holdings. It is distinct from, and frequently at odds with, the regulatory and inquisitorial apparatus of the Office of the Chief Librarian (OCL). The Office is headed by the Chief Archivist, a post that has been vacant for the better part of three spirals and is presently discharged by the Archivist Cadre in rotation. It is the office to which the Librarian of the Fifth Order is subordinate.

Mandate and jurisdiction

The OCA holds archival authority proper: the collation of holdings, the verification of their internal consistency, and the assignment of canonical shelf-marks. It does not regulate the polity of the Tower, nor does it conduct inquisitions, these functions having been separated from the Archivist's office by Annex Delta of the Third Concordance and vested in the newly created Chief Librarian. The two offices are reconciled through the Office of the Archivist-Librarian, a standing liaison whose minutes are filed on alternate floors and are consequently unreliable.

The distinction is jurisdictional rather than temperamental, though it is often described otherwise. The OCA may declare a holding canonical; it may not declare its keeper orthodox. Archivist Lethe, the current Chief Archivist-Referential, has put the matter plainly: "The Archivist verifies the page. What the page believes is the Librarian's affair." Referential Memorandum 9, Office of the Chief Archivist

The Chamber of Verified Function

The Chamber of Verified Function reports directly to the Office of the Chief Archivist and is the instrument by which holdings are tested for internal consistency before shelf-marking. Its examiners work in pairs, one reading forward and one backward, and a holding that fails to agree with itself in either direction is returned to its floor of origin with a notation in red.

The Chamber's most persistent difficulty is the class of holdings that agree with themselves perfectly but contradict the shelf-marks assigned to them by earlier recensions. In the winter of the forty-fourth aperture, a single inconsistency in the numbering of a corridor register propagated through eleven floors before an examiner noticed that the register had been filed twice under different numbers, both of which were correct. The resulting corrigendum ran to ninety pages and was itself later found to contain an error, which was allowed to stand as precedent.

Relations with the Office of the Chief Librarian

The two offices have never been at peace, though the peace has never formally been broken. The OCL regards the OCA's verification procedures as a slow encroachment on its regulatory prerogative; the OCA regards the OCL's inquiries as interruptions to the work of collation. Each cites the Concordances against the other, generally to opposite effect.

The dispute crystallized in the matter of Arbiter-in-Chief Valence, whose arbitration of the Shelf-Mark Question held that "where the Archivist and the Librarian both claim a holding, the holding is to be left where it lies until both offices have forgotten the claim." Valence, Arbitral Ruling 12 The ruling has been cited in every subsequent boundary dispute and has resolved none of them.

Governance and the Cadre

The Archivist Cadre manages the day-to-day operations of the Office — the rota of examiners, the custody of seals, the dispatch of corrigenda — and since the vacancy has assumed a number of functions that were never formally devolved to it. Proposals to regularize this arrangement have been tabled at every meeting of the Concordance of Offices for six apertures and remain tabled.

Candidates for the Fifth Order must defend their thesis before the Office, a procedure that has not been conducted since the vacancy and is now performed by the Cadre sitting in loco archivistae. The defence is held in the Reading Room of the Ninth Recess, which is unheated. Candidates are reminded to bring their own seal.

Contested points of record

Two matters remain disputed among the Office's own historians. The first is whether the OCA's authority over the corpus extends to holdings that have never been read. The Fourth Annex of the Third Concordance holds that unread holdings fall under the Librarian's jurisdiction; the Eighth Concordance, Annex 2, assigns them to the Archivist on the reasoning that what has not been read has not been regulated. The Office has adopted the latter position without resolving the question.

The second is the date of the vacancy itself. The Chronicle of the Fifth Spiral records that the last Chief Archivist was "removed to the upper floors on a matter of some delicacy," without further specification. The Office's own register records only that the post fell vacant on the fourteenth day of the ninth aperture and that the keys were returned by a porter whose name was not taken.

"The Office does not require a Chief Archivist to function. It requires a Chief Archivist to be blamed."

— Archivist Halloran, marginalia to Referential Memorandum 9