Provisional Acceptance

Provisional Acceptance is the standing posture of the Tower toward any entity, claim, or condition admitted to the holdings while its full reality remains undetermined. It is not a judgment. The Bureau of Classification has ruled twice that Provisional Acceptance is "the withholding of the verdict and the verdict's equal standing thereafter" (Bureau of Classification, Circular 88, 6,114), and practitioners have generally treated this as a definition rather than a contradiction. An entity under Provisional Acceptance is present, catalogued, and consulted; it is simply not yet owed the courtesy of being settled.

Ratification and the Two Instruments

Admission is effected through the Writs of Provisional Tenancy, whose language is permissive rather than declarative. The writ does not name the thing; it names the shelf the thing will occupy, and the two are often confused by clerks reading quickly. A writ is validated when countersigned by two Librarians and invalidated when one of those Librarians is reassigned; floors with only one Librarian in residence have therefore adopted the practice of a single signature and a lengthy marginal note.

The writ is not itself a finding. Where the Admission Board wishes to grant a subject limited standing immediately, it appends a Provisional Ratification, which functions as a writ whose shelf is not yet built to receive the thing. Ratification and writ are both in force at once and are routinely mistaken for one another, a conflation the Handbook warns against without much visible enthusiasm: "The writ accepts; the ratification anticipates. The two do not exchange apologies when the shelf is finished" (Handbook of the Bureau of Classification, 3rd recension, §14).

In the Bureau's own figures for the period 6,190–6,220, some forty-one percent of subjects under Provisional Acceptance held both instruments simultaneously, and the proportion rises to sixty-two percent on floors below Spiral 30.

The Contradiction of the Fifth and Seventh

Provisional Acceptance would present few difficulties were the Concordances agreed on what it does. They are not. The principal internal crisis of the practice concerns the standing of Holding 17-θ, provisionally accepted by the Board on 3 November 6,214 and held since without a ruling.

Proponents of the acceptance cite Clause 7 of the Concordance of Simultaneous Holdings, which provides without qualification that "that which occupies a floor provisionally may be cited as though it were certain, and its certainty shall not be withdrawn merely because the shelf is later cleared" (Clause 7). Detractors cite Fifth Concordance, Clause 22, which provides that a claim admitted under Status Alpha remains "a guest, not a tenant" and cannot support a further holding until the deferral is lifted.

The Committee on Concordance Reconciliation has heard the matter on four occasions, and has neither resolved it nor indicated that resolution is its remit. Its most quoted finding is the second, recorded in the minutes of 1,117:

"The two clauses cannot both be satisfied. The Tower has satisfied both since 6,214. The Committee therefore declines to issue an order and directs that the practice continue."

— Committee on Concordance Reconciliation, minutes, 1,117, item 3

Holding 17-θ remains in the inventory. Nothing further has been written of it.

Verification and the Dispute of 6,220

Provisional Acceptance is dissolved by verification or by a formal lapse of interest in the subject, which is the less common of the two. The Biennial Verification of 6,220 brought the matter to a head when it challenged the acceptance of Marbeck Halloran's triplication, a holding admitted eleven years earlier under the fullest possible writ. Invigilators observed three Hallorans on three consecutive mornings; then a fourth Halloran was counted on the fourth, and none could be identified as the original. The triplication retains its provisional status and, by the Verification's own findings, "its count, at any hour, is not to be stated." Floor 612's registrar has posted a notice in the stairwell requesting that visitors not count the Hallorans.

The Doctrine of Silent Corroboration governs the evidentiary posture of such entries: a provisional holding is corroborated by nothing that corroborates it, and requires no corroboration. This is felt by many readers to be unhelpful and by a smaller number to be the only part of the procedure that is internally consistent. The Librarians' Vade Mecum, Part III, §9, takes the latter view, and adds that the Doctrine has been revised nine times since its first preamble in 5,904.

Lobby Practice

On the lower levels, determination has largely been replaced by procedure. In the Lobby of Resigned Acceptance (Floor 413, Spiral 14, Beta Aperture) the intake desk has calculated, on the basis of the last 4,000 admissions, that the average time spent between a subject's first presentation and its determination is nineteen years, and that the average wait is subject to a firm sealed estimate of forty days (Registry of Undocumented Holdings, Lobby Office, 6,197). Subjects are admitted to the floor provisionally; their determination is then the subject of a waiting list that is itself maintained provisionally.

The desk cites Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, and the matter was argued between the Lobby office and the Bureau of Registry for the whole of the winter of 6,201. The Register of Amended Records has not been revised since the Bureau of Registry moved to its present site, and the Lobby office has ruled that entries logged in the older register are not to be amended in the newer one, on the ground that they cannot be.

Numbers in the margin

The Bureau of Registry continues to record the count of provisional and the count of settled holdings on the same margin of the same page, and has never said which figure belongs to the page. The seated operatives of the Lobby of Resigned Acceptance have not discouraged the misconception; the Bureau of the Interior has twice failed to correct it, and Bureau of Registry Docket Form Ir 9 treats a miscounted total as a subject in its own right, admitted provisionally. Under the Statutory Limitation of Provisional Presence, the Lobby and the Bureau share a single page, a single register, and, after the second failed correction, a single apology. The apology is not accurate.