Provenance Amp Acquisition

Definition and Jurisdiction

Provenance Amp Acquisition (PAA) is the administrative instrument under which a holding's acquisition record is amplified for the purposes of authentication — that is, extended, multiplied, or raised in authority beyond what the original record supports. The term denotes neither a body nor an office but a procedure, and is conventionally written with the ampersand abbreviated to distinguish it from the ordinary conjunction, although Acquisition Scribes observe the distinction only in formal instruments and ignore it in everything else.

PAA was articulated in Concordance of Acquisition, Annex 9, following a series of disputes in which holdings acquired under contested circumstances were entered with authentic-seeming chains that later collapsed. The Annex established that no provenance chain may be amplified until Department of Provenance has certified the underlying Protocol 17-B record as complete. In practice this means that amplification tends to proceed only where it is least needed.

The Amp Registration Question

The precise meaning of "amp" in the designation has been disputed since the Annex's ratification at Archive Reckoning 1. The Axioms of Acquisition treat the amp as a quantity — an integer multiplier applied to the evidentiary weight of the chain. Department of Provenance analysis of the Annex's ink and parchment threading supports this reading, and the Department has cited its own findings in every subsequent ruling on the matter, which other offices regard as bordering on unseemly.

The Bureau of Acquisition maintains instead that the amp is an adjective, describing a chain that has been "amplified" in the looser sense of "made louder" — that is, asserted with greater confidence. This reading has the practical advantage of permitting the amplification of a chain without any underlying evidence at all, and the Office of Acquisitions Amp Stasis has leaned on it on nine recorded occasions. The dispute is unresolved. The Triggers of Acquisition were amended in the winter of that year to close the gap, and reopened it by a drafting error in Clause 4.

Amp Stasis and the Warden

Where amplification cannot be completed before a holding deteriorates, the record is placed in amp stasis — suspended in its unamplified state, neither proceeding nor lapsing. Responsibility for stasis falls to the Warden of Silent Acquisitions, an office that has complained since its founding that it is asked to hold subjects nobody has agreed to classify. The Warden's standing grievance concerns Docket 41-K, a partial provenance chain acquired on a floor whose number is recorded inconsistently across three registers; the Warden has held it in stasis since the first year of the present administration and has twice requested that the indices be corrected so that the chain can be kept somewhere other than in the Warden's office, which is small.

Under Animal Singularity Provenance, chains that have not emerged within one cycle of acquisition are presumed to have been amplificands only, and may not be cited in any subsequent Phenomenological Description filed under Clause 5.

The Anselm Recension and the Server Room

A revision to the Annex was proposed by Clerk Anselm of the Bureau of Permissions Amp Transit in the third year, arguing that amplification should be available retrospectively to holdings already entered, on the ground that many entries would otherwise remain permanently unamplified and therefore permanently provisional. The recension was adopted by voice vote in a chamber that was not full, and was rescinded four days later when it was discovered to have implied that the Department of Provenance could amplify its own prior certifications — a recursion the Department refused to entertain.

The rescission order was stored in the server room on the ninth floor, a chamber that had not been entered since the order was filed and that no one has since been able to locate, the stairwell serving it having been reassigned to another purpose. The order remains technically in force. Practitioners continue to cite the recension in filings, and the Department has stopped replying to them.

Disagreement Over Retrospective Application

Two positions persist. The first holds that PAA applies only at the moment of entry, so that a holding admitted without amplification can never be amplified afterwards. The second holds that amplification is a property of the record and may be applied at any time, and that a chain's silence on the point is not evidence of anything. The Auto-Contradictory Provenance file was opened precisely because the two positions produced incompatible entries for the same subject on the same day.

"No chain shall be amplified in silence, nor in the presence of the acquirer, nor on a floor whose number it cannot state."

— Concordance of Acquisition, Annex 9, Clause 6

Clause 6 is generally read as a prohibition on ex parte amplification. The Aetiological Collector has argued that it instead prescribes a floor-naming requirement, on the strength of which argument several holdings have been amplified on the stairwell landing between two floors, a location that is not a floor and therefore arguably outside the Clause. The The Directorate of Acquisition and Authentication has not ruled on the landing practice and has asked that it not be raised again until the Department of Provenance has finished its current survey.

Current Standing

PAA remains in force in its original form, with the Anselm recension nominally rescinded and the seventh-floor instruction that has caused the most trouble in recent years still posted in the stairwell where it began. The transcription of the operating instruction is as follows: "Whichever of the two first reaches the landing shall record the hour and may not thereafter amend it." Practitioners who work late have learned to check the clock before beginning an amplification, since the hour, once recorded, is the only part of the chain that cannot be disputed.