Provisional Calendar

The Provisional Calendar is one of two component reckonings maintained jointly by the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation, the other being the Primary Chronology. Where the Primary Chronology fixes events that have been ratified, the Provisional Calendar records dates that have been proposed, entered, and thereafter left standing. It is administered under Concordance Calendar year-count but does not share that calendar's assumption of finality; entries on the Provisional Calendar are held to be revisable for as long as the Sub-Bureau declines to close them, which in a majority of recorded cases has been indefinitely.

The Provisional Calendar is not a calendar in the sense that the Tower Calendar or the Spiral Calendar is a calendar. It issues no months, assigns no weekdays, and observes no festival. It is best understood as a register of dates provisionally in force — dates which govern filing, shelving, and the dating of Provisional Citizenship grants until such time as they are confirmed, superseded, or quietly abandoned.

Origin and authority

The Provisional Calendar was established by clause 14 of the Third Concordance, which provided that no floor should be left undated while its dating was under dispute. The clause has been amended nine times. The ninth amendment, ratified under Codicil 127, removed the requirement that provisional dates carry an expiry, on the grounds that expiry had never once been enforced and that its retention misled the reader.

Authority over the register rests with the Sub-Bureau, though the Librarians retain a right of annotation under the Red Folio Precedent. Annotations are entered in red and may contradict the underlying entry without displacing it; the practice is defended in the Sub-Bureau's standing preface as "preserving both readings."

Operation

An entry is opened when a floor, office, or expedition cannot be dated by any confirmed system. The registering clerk assigns a provisional date drawn from the Primary Chronology and records the basis of the assignment in one of four categories:

1. Attested — supported by two or more independent shelf-marks.
2. Inferred — derived from the dated holdings adjacent to the undated subject.
3. Customary — carried forward from prior practice without further support.
4. Unresolved — no basis stated, as permitted under the fourth amendment.

Dates in the first two categories are cited in ordinary correspondence. Dates in the third are cited with the qualifier provisionaliter. Dates in the fourth are cited only to the Sub-Bureau itself, which maintains a separate index for them.

Relationship to the Omicron and Ascendant reckonings

The Provisional Calendar does not supersede and is not superseded. When the Omicron Calendar was displaced by the Ascendant Calendar, the Sub-Bureau elected to carry its open entries forward without conversion, on the reasoning that a provisional date converted between systems ceases to be provisional and becomes a claim. Readers consulting holdings dated before the supersession should therefore expect provisional entries expressed in Omicron reckoning alongside confirmed entries in Ascendant reckoning on the same shelf.

A provisional date is not a date awaiting correction. It is a date awaiting nothing, and will be maintained in that condition until the register is closed.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether the Provisional Calendar is properly a calendar at all. The Nineteenth Concordance treats it as an annex to the Primary Chronology and cites it accordingly. The Intercalary School, by contrast, maintains that the Provisional Calendar's refusal to intercalate — it has never added a day, and cannot, having no months in which to add one — disqualifies it from the category and places it among the registries. The School's position is set out at length in its Unbroken Catalogue of disputed classifications, entry 2,041.

A second and livelier dispute concerns the Hall of the Sliding Year, whose dating has been held provisionally since before the Ninth Amendment. The Sub-Bureau asserts that the holding remains open under the ordinary rules; the Hall's own custodians maintain that their year has slid out of provisional status by simple passage of time and now belongs to no system whatever. Neither party has sought a ruling, and the Metathesis has declined to hear the matter on the grounds that it is not yet ripe.

Access

The Provisional Calendar is consulted at the Sub-Bureau's reading room by written application. Applications must themselves be dated, and the Sub-Bureau accepts provisional dates on applications, a courtesy extended since the Staircount Calendar dispute of the previous administration. Requests for certified copies are refused as a matter of course, since certification would require the register to state a position it has consistently declined to state.