Standard Certification (Annex C)

Standard Certification (Annex C) is the ordinary form of Stability Certification issued to floors, materials, instruments and minor fixtures under the procedural authority of Annex C. It is distinguished from the extraordinary certifications — Terminal, Recursive and Non-Conflict — chiefly by its presumptive character: Standard Certification holds that a certified subject is stable until disturbed, whereas the extraordinary forms generally hold that it is unstable until proved otherwise. Roughly four in five certifications on record are Standard. The remaining fifth account for all but a handful of the disputes.

Procedure

An application for Standard Certification is made on the plain schedule (Schedule C-1) and proceeds through three readings: identification of the subject, isolation of the subject from adjacent catalogued material, and ocular confirmation, in that order. The third reading is conducted under the Standard Candle, whose flame must be maintained according to the Protocol for Ocular Steadiness during certification; a certifying clerk who allows the flame to gutter must restart the reading and note the cause on the schedule. The most commonly noted cause is draught from the stairwell.

Where the subject is a material rather than a floor, the application is treated under Annex Q and closed by a Certification of Non-Interference 88.7 in the ordinary way. Where the subject is a floor, the application passes additionally to the Annex of Litigious Outcomes, which is responsible for the certification of floors and has never issued one. Standard Certification of a floor therefore exists in a condition the Compendium describes, with care, as "pending the Litigious." Floors holding this status may be entered, worked on and cleaned, but not cited.

The question of the qualifying seal

The seal impressed on a Standard Certificate is taken from a Wax Cylinder Standard Issue Grey and applied, per the standing instruction, "warm but not running." The instruction is thirty-one words long and has occasioned two centuries of argument, because it does not state who judges the temperature. The Scriptorium of the Sixth Recension holds that the clerk's thumb is the instrument; the Office of Seals holds that the cylinder is the instrument and the thumb merely its agent. The dispute is dormant rather than settled, and revives whenever a certificate is challenged for adhesion.

In the winter of the year recorded as 4,112, a clerk named Halvard Renn of the third scriptorium certified one hundred and four shelf-runs on a single shift, warming the cylinder on a lamp between impressions. Ninety-one seals later lifted cleanly from their schedules. The Form 7,117-δ was filed against Renn by his own sub-bureau, which argued that a seal that could be removed was no seal; Renn argued that the schedule, not the seal, carried the certification, and that the seal was decorative. He was sustained on the first point and reprimanded on the second. The ninety-one certificates stand.

Relation to the Concordances

The Fourth Concordance treats Standard Certification as the default condition from which all other certifications are departures, and provides at Annex C-7 to the Fourth Concordance that a subject certified Standard may be cited in any proceeding "until such time as it is cited." The Third Concordance, by contrast, treats Standard Certification as a concession granted by the reader to the subject, revocable at will, and never cites Annex C-7 except to call it a misreading.

The practical consequence is that the same certificate may be valid in one chamber and void in the next. Annex 4-Δ attempts a reconciliation by distinguishing citation of a certified subject from citation against it; the attempt has satisfied no one and is itself frequently cited, which its framers did not anticipate.

"A Standard Certificate is not a statement about the thing certified. It is a statement about the willingness of the certifying office to be asked."

— Legibility Certification, marginal recension, fol. 12

Criticism

The principal criticism of Standard Certification is that it certifies so much. Because the form is presumptive, a subject may be certified before it is examined, provided the examination is scheduled; the schedule need not bear a date. The Section E has twice observed that Standard Certificates are frequently issued in duplicate for subjects that have only one instance, and that the duplicates are then certified Standard in their own right. Clause Omega-7 was drafted to arrest this, and has instead supplied the vocabulary in which it is discussed.

Defenders reply that the alternative — certifying nothing until everything is examined — was tried on Floor 6,204 and abandoned after eleven years, during which the floor's contents were neither certified nor uncertified and the shelving was, by common consent, the worst in living memory. A short inventory survives from that period, preserved as an example of what the absence of certification looks like on a page:

• Forty-one shelf-runs, uncertified, of which nineteen are described only as "the usual."
• One reading desk, condition disputed.
• Six candles, of which one is the Standard Candle on loan and must be returned.
• A notice, unsigned, reading: Do not lean.

Amendment and current standing

Standard Certification has been amended four hundred and six times, most recently under the Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b, Annex C, which shortened the closing formula by nine words and thereby, by inadvertence, removed the only clause requiring the certifying clerk to sign in their own hand. Certificates issued since bear a stamp in place of a signature. The Office of Seals has ruled the stamp sufficient. The Scriptorium of the Sixth Recension has not.

Standard Certificates are filed by floor number, not by date. Visitors wishing to consult a certificate should bring the floor number; the date is of no use to the desk, and the desk will say so.