Provisional Authentication

Provisional Authentication is the form of limited standing conferred on a catalogued object whose provenance is accepted as sufficient for shelving but not sufficient for classification. A provisionally authenticated holding is real for the purposes of the Tower — it may be consulted, cited, moved between floors, and insured — but it may not be described. The distinction is old and is enforced with some severity. A provisionally authenticated object is entered in the Provisional Ledgers under a docket number and an interim description of no more than four words, one of which must be provisional.

Origin and statutory basis

The practice descends from Concordance 23, which provided for the "expedited authentication" of certain classes of provisional subject and whose Subclause Gamma extended that provision to architecture. The extension was intended narrowly — it concerned the fabric of the Tower itself, whose stones could hardly be held in abeyance pending a full dossier — but Subclause Gamma was drafted without a closing list, and by the winter of 1462 it had been read to cover stairwells, then doorplates, then the doors behind the doorplates. The Directorate of Acquisition and Authentication has twice attempted to close the list. Both attempts are recorded, and neither took effect.

Procedure is governed chiefly by the Material Authentication Protocol, which mandates Sigil Authentication before any docket may be presented for review. The MAP does not itself create provisional status; it merely declines to remove it. This negative construction is the source of much of the confusion surrounding the practice, and of the whole of the dispute described below.

The stages, and where they stop

Full standing is conferred by Documentary Authentication, a multi-agency process terminating in categorical stability. Provisional Authentication is what obtains when that process is interrupted after Source Authentication but before the Evidentiary Review & Contextual Cohesion phase conducted by the Bureau of Authentication. In practice a holding sits at this station for a median of nine years. The Bureau has never disputed the figure; it disputes the median.

An object so interrupted may be formally sealed by use of the Gavel of Deferred Judgment, which leaves a spectral imprint on the holding's Certificate and, by a provision of Concordance 412 that no one has found reason to repeal, on the Certificate of every object shelved within the same aperture. Aperture wells on the lower spiral consequently carry long columns of ghost marks, and clerks working there are issued a second Certificate form. The Gavel is held at the Scriptorium of Lost Roots and may be borrowed on written application. It may not be taken below Floor [number withheld].

The four-word rule

The four-word limit on interim description is enforced by the Wardens of the Interim Register and has produced a compact literature of evasion. A holding awaiting classification as a species of folding chair is entered as provisional article, folding, seated. A disputed migration route is provisional route, northern, contested. The Warden Sethura Vin is remembered for the ruling of 1519 that a description must be communicative to a reader who has not seen the object, a standard later abandoned because it could not be met by any four-word string and had the effect of emptying the Register for eleven months.

Vin's successor, Warden Ospreth of the Lower Register, reversed the ruling and added the requirement that the fourth word in every interim description be one of a fixed list of ninety-one approved terms. The list is appended to the Register and is not itself provisionally authenticated. Requests for a ninety-second term are heard on the second Wednesday of each quarter.

Doctrinal dispute

Whether Provisional Authentication is a species of authentication at all is unsettled. The Protocol of Recursive Authentication and its recension, The Protocol of Recursive Authentication, take opposing positions. The Protocol holds that provisional status is authentically conferred and therefore subject to its own procedure, so that each provisional ruling requires a further provisional ruling ad infinitum. The recension holds that the status is merely withheld and that nothing is conferred. The difference is not academic: under the Protocol, a docket requires an average of four additional rulings before it can be shelved; under the recension, one. Shelving times on the upper spiral have varied by a factor of six depending on which text the floor's Registrar happens to keep at hand.

The Directorate of Acquisition and Authentication has declined to resolve the question, noting in its circular of 1604 that "the Protocol and the recension are both authentic, and the Directorate does not adjudicate between authentic instruments." Interstitial Authentication is sometimes proposed as a via media; it is not one.

Record of holdings

The following were provisionally authenticated in the same year and remain so:

• One (1) staircase, ascending, unlanding — docket 4-Gamma-118
• One (1) bird, described, unobserved — docket 4-Gamma-119
• Seven (7) metres of corridor, disputed — docket 4-Gamma-121
• One (1) Certificate of Provisional Authentication, missing — docket 4-Gamma-122

The last entry is closed but not concluded. Its Certificate was issued under the Gavel and bears the spectral imprint of a second, earlier sealing, which the Wardens have been unable to match to any docket. It is filed under provisional imprint, unattributed, sealed.

"No holding shall be described beyond the terms of its docket, nor shall the absence of a description be taken as a description of absence."

— Concordance 23, Annex 7, as amended