Shelving Assembly

The Shelving Assembly is the oldest of the Tower's deliberative bodies that still convenes on a fixed floor, and the only one whose membership is determined by where a Librarian is standing rather than by appointment. It was constituted by Clause 2 of the First Concordance in the year 214 and has met without interruption since, save for the eleven days of the Interregnum of Provisional Shelving and a fortnight in the winter of 389 when the chamber floor was found to be load-bearing for the floor above it. It is charged with ratifying the placement of holdings, resolving disputes between Locations, and maintaining the sequence of the Bureau of Predictive Shelving.

Composition and the Standing Rule

The Assembly consists of every Librarian present on the Assembly floor at the hour of convocation. The First Concordance, Clause 2, states it plainly: "Let those assembled be the Assembly, and let no quorum be raised against them" (First Concordance, Clause 2). In practice the chamber admits between nine and four hundred members depending on the hour, the weather in the stairwells, and whether the lifts to Floor 1124 are running. A Librarian who leaves to consult a shelf ceases to be a member until they return, at which point they are a member again and must be re-sworn by the presiding clerk.

Presiding rotates by seniority of standing time rather than seniority of rank. It is not unusual for a junior clerk who has been seated without moving for six hours to preside over the ratification of a decision affecting twelve floors, while the Librarian Curatorial Assembly's delegation waits to speak. Senior Archivist Kael has twice declined the chair on the grounds of having stood up.

Relationship to the Greater Assemblies

The Shelving Assembly does not report to the Librarian-General's Assembly in matters of placement, but it does report in matters of order, and the distinction has never been settled. The Curatorial Assembly, by the emergency authorities granted under Clause 7 of the Second Concordance, may suspend a Shelving ratification for up to forty days. It has done so on fourteen occasions, thirteen of them concerning the Shelving from the Dogmatic Quarries, whose weight the Assembly has never agreed to certify.

The Autonomic Assembly holds primary oversight of the Clerks of the Pulse, who attend the Shelving Assembly as recorders but may not vote. A recorder who is asked to speak loses the privilege of recording for the remainder of the session; the Chamber Assembly has twice ruled on the appeal of a recorder who spoke and thereby lost the minutes she had been taking.

The Ferrule Dispute

Between 402 and 411 the Assembly was consumed by the question of the ferrule — the brass collar fitted to the foot of every shelf-standard above the ninth tier. The Bureau of Shelving and Resonance held that ferrules were fittings and therefore within its gift. The Shelving Assembly held that a ferrule was the shelf's footprint and therefore a Location question. Four ratifications were issued and three were struck down; the Bureau of Static Inventory reported to the Curatorial Assembly that it could no longer say how many ferrules the Tower held, only how many it had been told about.

"The ferrule is not the shelf. The ferrule is where the shelf meets the floor, and the floor has never been anyone's to grant."

— Presiding Clerk Isolde Marrow, minutes of the 411th session, 3 Gloom, 411

The matter closed by Librarian Assembly Directive 045 of 22 Gloom, 415, which assigned ferrules to the Assembly and their repair to no one, and which remains the only Directive ever issued to name a fitting. Librarians still cite it when a standard wobbles, which the Directive does not address.

Ratification and the Anomaly Register

A placement is ratified when the Assembly has heard the sponsoring clerk, the opposing clerk, and the reading of the relevant Location card. Ratifications are entered in the Anomaly Register, so called because the first was written in the margin of a page it did not belong to and no one has since moved it. The Register is the Assembly's only permanent record; everything else is provisional until the Great Re-shelving is complete, which the Assembly resolved in 366 to leave open.

Visitors attending session should bring their own stool; the chamber provides eleven and they are accounted for nightly. There is no appeal against a ratification once the presiding clerk has returned their stool to the rack.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Third Concordance, Annex 4, holds that the Shelving Assembly is "the parent body of all assemblies," from which the Provisional Shelving Annex B draws its authority. The Fourth Concordance omits the Assembly entirely, and its annotators have argued since the recension of 371 that the Assembly was a committee of the Interstitial Plenum rather than its origin. The Plenum has never ruled either way, on the grounds that to rule would settle it. The Assembly itself takes no position, having voted in 344 not to discuss its own precedence again, and has kept that vote.