Scouring of the Provisional Stacks

The Scouring of the Provisional Stacks was a scheduled administrative purge of the Provisional Stacks, conducted over eleven days in the winter of Year 88 of the Present Recension, and the occasion on which the Provisional Cataloguers' Guild first exercised its powers of removal under Concordance 7. The Scouring is not remembered, within the Tower, as a catastrophe. It is remembered as a cleaning, and the distinction between the two is the subject of the longest-running annotation dispute in the Guild's registry.

Origin and authority

Concordance 7 established the Provisional Stacks and the Guild that governs them, and in its ninth clause granted the Guild leave to "remove from the provisional holdings such matter as has ceased to be provisional without becoming anything else." The clause was drafted hastily; the surviving fair copy in the Scriptorium of the Ninth Spiral shows three corrections to the word matter and none to the word ceased. For six decades the clause was read narrowly, and nothing was removed at all.

The reading changed with Provisional Grant 44-Sigma, which classified the Non-Euclidean Stacks and, in passing, defined a class of holdings called lapsed provisional — matter that had exhausted its provisional term without attaining canonical standing. The Guild's Registrar at the time, Halvet Mor, observed in a marginal note that the two instruments together made a Scouring not merely lawful but overdue. The note survives; the Registrar's name is not otherwise recorded in the Guild ledger.

Conduct of the Scouring

The Scouring proceeded floor by floor from the Interim Stacks downward. Teams of three worked in the hours between the fifth and ninth bell; a team of one worked the hours between the ninth and the fifth. The work consisted of lifting each lapsed holding, comparing it against its accession slip, reading the slip aloud, and — where the two agreed — carrying the holding to the Hall of Interim Objects for re-accessioning. Where they did not agree, the holding was left in place and a gummed tag affixed to the shelf edge.

By the sixth day the tags outnumbered the removals, and the Scouring was suspended while the Guild reconciled slips with shelves. It emerged that a quantity of matter in the Wing for Ephemeral Geometries, accessioned under Provisional Grant 44-Sigma Annex 3, had never possessed a slip at all, having been shelved directly from a lift during a prior relocation of uncertain date. The Guild ruled these holdings aboriginally provisional and exempted them from scouring by a resolution of the seventh day, which has never been repealed and which no one has since invoked. The suspension cost four days and, by the estimate of the Scour-Master, two hundred and eleven holdings.

A single visiting rule applied throughout: no one was to read anything aloud twice (Scouring Standing Order 4, cited in Compendium of Unheeded Dissents, item 61).

The Floor 442 question

The Scouring is chiefly remembered for what it did not do to Floor 442. The floor's holdings were queued for the tenth day and never reached; the working party assigned to it reported that the stairhead would not admit them and returned without recording a reason. The floor's registers show no interruption whatever in the winter of the Scouring, which is either conclusive evidence that no scouring occurred there or evidence that the Scouring occurred there and was recorded in a ledger since misfiled. The Warden of Ephemeral Stacks, whose seal appears on the Floor 442 registers for that quarter, has declined four times to clarify the matter and once declined in writing.

Numbers, and a disagreement

The Guild's closing return, filed on the eleventh day, states the following:

• Holdings examined: 14,802
• Holdings removed and re-accessioned: 3,119
• Holdings left in place, tagged: 5,470
• Holdings counted twice: not stated
• Holdings unaccounted for at close: 212

The discrepancy of 212 against the suspension estimate is the substance of the disagreement. The Guild holds that the difference was reconciled on the ninth day by the Scour-Master's clerk, Kelda Rhen, who worked the overnight shift alone and left a correction slip that was subsequently lost. Rhen's own account, preserved in her deposition to the Compendium of Unheeded Dissents, differs sharply: she states that she counted the missing holdings twice, as instructed, found 424, and was told to halve it.

"I said they could not be halved, being neither paired nor comparable. I was told that everything in the Provisional Stacks is comparable, which is the entire reason the Stacks exist. I did as I was told and I wish it noted that I said so first."

— Deposition of Kelda Rhen, Compendium of Unheeded Dissents, item 144

A minority reading, advanced in the annotations to Warden of Ephemeral Stacks and never adopted by the Guild, holds that 212 is not a variance but a floor, and that the unaccounted matter is still on the shelves, tagged, waiting for the Scouring to resume. The Provisional Guidelines for Sub-Terranean Holdings permit a resumption at any time on fourteen days' notice. None has been given. The Lower Stacks note their own related confusion in the matter of the Schism of the Lower Stacks, with which the Scouring is frequently and wrongly conflated.

Legacy

The Scouring generated a body of standing orders, tags, and counter-slips that the Guild has never fully absorbed; the Canonical Stacks regard this residue as the origin of their standing objection to all provisional instruments. Two practices date from it and persist: the gummed tag, now a fixed article of Guild stores, and the custom of leaving the seventh day's resolutions unread. A third practice — the reading aloud of accession slips — fell out of use in the following decade, and no one who worked the Scouring is recorded as having missed it.