Seventh Concordance, Annex 4

Scope

The Seventh Concordance, Annex 4 is a procedural annex appended to the Seventh Concordance, governing the interim custody of catalogued subjects whose floor assignments are under dispute. It is composed of eleven clauses and two appendices, and is notable among the Concordances' annexes for being the only one ratified twice, in different years, by different officers, for different reasons. Annex 4 was drafted during the Third Scriptorial Winter by the Office of Provisional Holdings, a body whose authority has since been absorbed — unevenly — by the Office of Annex 12. Its original purpose was narrow: to prevent subjects removed from disputed floors from being catalogued a second time on the floor to which they were subsequently moved. This problem, known as the double-cataloguing crisis, is generally dated to the winter of the 401st recension, though the Fourth Revision places it considerably earlier.

Relationship to other annexes

Annex 4 occupies an unusual position in the Concordance's internal hierarchy. Unlike Seventh Concordance, Annex Q or Seventh Concordance, Annex Theta, it does not claim jurisdiction over a defined class of documents or procedures. Instead, it claims jurisdiction over time — specifically, the interval between a subject's removal and its reassignment. This has produced a long-running dispute with Seventh Concordance, Annex D, which holds that all interim custody falls under the auspices of the Interstitial Plenums governed by Annex B of the Seventh Concordance. The dispute has never been formally resolved. Under Clause 4, Annex C of the Seventh Concordance, unresolved jurisdictional conflicts are to be referred to the Annex of Litigious Outcomes to the Seventh Concordance, which has on four separate occasions returned the matter to its origin without comment. A third position, advanced by the anonymous compilers of The Partial Surveythe Seventh Concordance, holds that Annex 4 and Annex D are not in conflict at all, but describe the same interval in different vocabularies. This view is unpopular in both offices.

Clause structure

The eleven clauses of Annex 4 are arranged in three groups. Clauses 1–4 define custody and its limits. Clauses 5–8 address the transfer of a subject between floors when the receiving floor's number is itself contested. Clauses 9–11, added by the second ratification, address the case of subjects which have been in interim custody for longer than the interval they were removed from. Clause 7 is the most cited. It provides that a subject in interim custody retains the descriptive properties it held at the moment of removal, and acquires none further until reassigned. This has been read as prohibiting the well-established practice of annotating provisional holdings, a reading the Office of Annex 12 formally rejected in the year of the Long Corridor Resurvey. Appendix A lists the seals required for each class of transfer. Appendix B, added during the second ratification, is a table of intervals that no two scriptoria reproduce identically.

The two ratifications

The first ratification, in the early years of the 402nd recension, was performed by the Deputy Keeper of Provisional Holdings, whose name is recorded only as a title. The second, some decades later, was performed by Librarian Aurel Kesse of the Office of Annex 12, who maintained that the first ratification had lapsed when its seal was misplaced during the re-shelving of Annex 12-C. The Office of Provisional Holdings' successor body disputes this, holding that a seal may be misplaced without a ratification lapsing, and that the two are distinct categories of event. The practical consequence is that certain clauses of Annex 4 are considered to be in force by one office and not by the other. Clause 9, which addresses subjects in long-term interim custody, is the most affected. Under Clause 9, a subject held in interim custody for more than forty intervals must be either reassigned or entered into the Diminished Seventh of Disquiet, a register maintained on the Seventeenth Floor that no one has been observed to consult. Visitors should note that interim holdings are not viewable by the general public; the corridor leading to them is closed for re-shelving on the first and third Tuesdays of each interval, and has been since before the corridor existed.

Scholarly disagreement

The dominant scholarly dispute concerns the second ratification's validity. One school, associated with the scriptoria of the Forty-First Floor, holds that Kesse's ratification was procedurally sound and that Clause 9 has been in force continuously since. The opposing school, associated with Annex D, Clause 22, holds that a lapsed ratification cannot be revived, and that Annex 4 has existed since the first ratification as an unratified document — legally extant, but without the force necessary to compel reassignment. A third view, less frequently printed, holds that both ratifications are valid and that this is the more serious problem. Under Annex Q, Paragraph 12, prediction tables bearing on the outcome of either reading are maintained by the Office of Annex 12. The tables have not been updated in some time.