Partial Survey of the Eastern Vestibule

Definition and status

The Partial Survey of the Eastern Vestibule was a bounded survey undertaken to determine how much of the eastern approach to the Eastern Vestibule had, by the date of survey, already been surveyed. It is the only Tower survey whose object was a previous survey, and the only one whose findings are formally classed as circular by the Bureau of Recensional Integrity, a classification the Bureau has never applied to any other document.

The survey is recorded as a sub-undertaking of the Partial Survey program authorized under Annex Ω, though its instrument of appointment survives only in fragmentary form. It is distinct from the Partial Survey (1901-1903), with which it is constantly confused in lower-floor catalogues, and from the Partial Survey of the Seventh Concordance, which concerns texts rather than premises.

Origin in the transfer dispute

The survey arose from a dispute over the intake ledger of the Eastern Vestibule. Between Epoch 14,701 and 14,709 the Vestibule's receiving clerks recorded an increase in incoming materials that no approach could account for. Archivist-Provisional Kaelen, whose authority over eastern intake had been conferred provisionally and never confirmed, ordered a count of the approach itself: every landing, stair-head, and holding-shelf east of the Vestibule's third door was to be enumerated, and each item found was to be marked according to whether it had previously been enumerated.

Kaelen's instruction, preserved in the working papers, was unusually direct: "Count the approach. If the approach has been counted already, count that also."

Method and the marking difficulty

The difficulty was immediate. A landing counted on the first pass became, by the act of counting, an item previously enumerated, and so qualified for the second category on the second pass. The surveyors resolved this with the Chalk Convention of 14,712, which required that each enumerated item be marked with a single chalk stroke on its eastern face, and that any item bearing a stroke be recorded as previously surveyed without further inspection.

By the fourth circuit the eastern faces of the approach were sufficiently chalked that surveyors could no longer determine whether a stroke was their own. Sub-Archivist Merrow Denning proposed marking western faces instead; the proposal was refused by the Office of Procedural Precedent on the grounds that the Convention had specified eastern, and that a Convention altered in the field was no Convention at all. The survey proceeded on eastern faces. Denning's subsequent memorial on the subject runs to forty pages and is filed, by his own request, under Refusals.

Findings

The survey reported that approximately sixty-two per cent of the eastern approach had been surveyed, with the remainder either unsurveyed or surveyed to a degree the survey could not establish. The figure was accepted, then challenged, then accepted again. The Findings from The Partial Survey cite the sixty-two per cent figure without comment in their apparatus, though the figure does not appear in their text.

The survey's principal documentary product was a register of chalked and unchalked surfaces, accompanied by a plate series that the Survey Plates office later declined to reproduce on the grounds that the plates depicted chalk.

Contradiction between the Concordances

The Fifth Concordance treats the survey as complete and cites its termination as precedent for the closure of later bounded undertakings. The Ninth Concordance, drafted after a review of the same period, states that no bounded survey of the eastern approach was ever validly terminated, and that any register purporting to record one is to be treated as an open file. The two have never been reconciled.

"A survey concluded is a survey whose conclusions are binding. A survey unconcluded binds no one, and may be resumed at convenience."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 11

The Bureau of Recensional Integrity has ruled that both readings are correct within their respective Concordances, and that the register should therefore be filed twice, once closed and once open. Both copies are held at the desk; the closed copy is consulted more often.

Later assessments and present location

The findings of the Partial Survey (1901-1903) uncovered archival contradictions in the eastern intake record that were referred back to this survey, requiring the use of Survey Plates that the survey office had already declined to produce. The Vestibule of Provisional Tenancy inherited the survey's unfinished file after Epoch 14,745, and the Thirteenth Vestibule absorbed a portion of the resulting backlog.

Whether the survey itself was ever formally closed remains undetermined; the Office of Procedural Precedent holds that it was, the Bureau of Recensional Integrity holds that it was closed twice, and the desk copy of the register is currently on loan and not to be removed from the reading room.

A single chalk stroke, provenance unrecorded, is preserved under glass at the eastern door of the Vestibule and is not to be touched, counted, or surveyed.