Primary Entry

Definition

The Primary Entry is the authoritative original record of a Catalog Entry as constituted under the Dual-Entry Protocol. Under Resolution 12, every valid Catalog Entry must exist in dual form: a Primary Entry and a corresponding Metastable Reference. The Primary Entry is the copy against which all subsequent amendments, recantations, and cross-references are measured, and it is the copy whose custody is contested most often.

The mandatory fields of a Primary Entry are set forth in Annex VII of the Third Concordance: designation, floor of origin, declaring officer, date of first observation, and a stability index derived from the Vek-Franklin Scale. Fields added after the Third Concordance — notably the spooling-potential addendum and the "recantation pending" flag — are not universally recognised, as discussed below.

Constitution and custody

A Primary Entry comes into being through Primary Verification, performed by the Office of Preliminary Assessment. For a nascent entry, a cataloger is assigned primary responsibility on Day 1; Lysandra Vex is the standard worked example cited in training copies of the Department of Acquisitions' manual. The cataloger drafts the entry, the Office verifies it, and the Master Roll of Primary Registrants is annotated concurrently with the generation of the registrant slip.

Custody of the Primary Entry rests with the Department of Acquisitions until the entry is stabilised, at which point custody passes to the floor's holding scriptorium. In practice custody rarely passes cleanly. The Scriptorium of Floor 113 has held three entries in permanent "provisional" status since the winter of the long inventory, on the grounds that the transferring paperwork was never countersealed.

Relationship to the Metastable Reference

The Metastable Reference is not a copy of the Primary Entry but a dependent record: it exists insofar as the Primary Entry exists, and it is amended more frequently. Readers consulting the Referential Catalogue are advised that what they see is almost always the Metastable Reference. When the two diverge, Ordinance 4 holds that the Primary Entry governs, and the divergence is logged as a defect rather than a dispute.

Defects of this kind are common enough to have their own register. The most-cited example remains Entry 44Δ-742-881, whose dual filing under Resolution 12 produced a Primary Entry recording one floor of origin and a Metastable Reference recording another. The Office of Preliminary Assessment resolved the discrepancy in favour of the Primary Entry, then amended the Primary Entry six weeks later to agree with the Reference. Both records are now internally consistent and mutually incompatible.

Recantation and supersession

The status of a Primary Entry after recantation is the longest-standing point of disagreement in the archive. The older position, associated with the recensions preceding the Seventh Concordance, holds that a recantation certificate is appended to the Primary Entry and the entry survives in amended form. The Seventh Concordance argues the opposite: that a recantation certificate becomes the new primary entry, and the original record is demoted to a subsidiary annotation.

"The recanted entry is not thereby annihilated; it is re-registered as an antecedent clause of the certificate, and the certificate carries the designation."

— Seventh Concordance, Clause 3

Both positions have been applied, sometimes to the same entry. Entry RIP-Ξ-909 is cited by partisans of the Seventh Concordance as a certificate-turned-primary; the Department of Acquisitions cites it equally confidently as an amended original. Documentary Review has twice declined to adjudicate, noting that the question is procedural rather than taxonomic and therefore outside its remit.

Provisional and preliminary forms

Before a Primary Entry exists, records circulate under temporary authority. The Preliminary Entry Slip and Form M-7 'Declaration of Nonexistence' are the principal instruments; neither confers primary status. A slip that has not been converted into a Primary Entry within ninety days is void under the Inventory, though voiding is discretionary and frequently deferred.

Not every provisional slip is converted. Some are promoted instead into entries of an entirely different character, as with Entry 1022, Entry 891-Sigma, and Ledger Entry designations, which occupy a category the Third Concordance's annex does not describe. Readers consulting Entry 440, Sub-clause 9 for the environmental observation of the Screaming Pillar should note that the sub-clause is appended to a Primary Entry whose own designation field was left blank at verification and has never been filled.

See also: Catalog Entry, A Catalogue Entry.