Tactile Guidelines

Tactile Guidelines is the collective designation for the body of instrument-grade handling instructions issued to readers, porters, and inspecting clerks who must come into physical contact with catalogued holdings. The Guidelines are not a single document. They are a numbered series, currently at eighty-nine articles, each specifying permitted pressures, durations of contact, direction of approach, and the ambient conditions under which a holding may be touched at all. They are administered by the Bureau of Provisional Indexing and are, by the reckoning of the Revised Guidelines for Citation Hierarchy, subordinate to the Provisional Indexing Guidelines in all matters of classification and superior to them in all matters of hand placement.

Origin and Recensions

The series originated in the winter of the year recorded as 4,412 by the Tower's internal count, following an incident on a floor since renumbered three times and now designated only by its aperture. A junior clerk, Marta Ells, was tasked with transferring a set of unmarked vitreous tiles between cases. She handled them without instruction, as none existed. The tiles were later determined to have been catalogued under a provisional classification since ruled void. Ells submitted no complaint; she did, however, submit a memorandum of eleven pages, and it is from her memorandum that Article 1 of the Tactile Guidelines is drawn almost verbatim. The original manuscript is held in the Repository of Provisional Forms, bound with the second recension of the Provisional Guidelines for Intake.

Article 1 remains the shortest and most cited: "Where a holding's surface has not been measured, it is to be considered unmeasured, and it is not to be held." Attempts to clarify the article have produced the two later recensions, the fourth of which (Recension 4c) runs to ninety pages and is generally considered the least useful.

Relation to the Claudius Scale

The Guidelines take their grading vocabulary from the Claudius Scale of Tactile Resistance, though not without friction. Under Article 17, every holding must be assigned a Claudius value between C0 and C10 before any instruction concerning it may be issued. Holdings below C2 may be handled directly. Holdings between C2 and C6 require an interposed membrane of standard weight. Holdings above C6 are not to be handled; they are to be read at distance, and the reading is to be recorded as though it had been tactile, with the notation by proxy appended.

This arrangement was disturbed in the year 4,467, when an inspecting clerk, Osen Vail, observed that certain holdings classified C9 registered on the Claudius instrument as though they were C1. Vail's report to the Protocols Directorate argued that the Scale measured resistance to touch, not the prudence of touching, and that the two had been conflated since the first recension. The Directorate declined to hear the argument, on the grounds that it had been made in the wrong quarter and in the wrong year. Vail's report was nonetheless filed and may be consulted under Article 17, Annex D, and it is cited more often now than the article it annotates.

Contested Articles

The Guidelines' internal contradictions are numerous and largely unresolved. Most are small — Article 23 requires that holdings be approached from the left, Article 24 from the side on which the label is affixed, and a floor's holdings may satisfy only one of these. The Eleventh Concordance addresses the difficulty obliquely, in language that has been read to favour either article depending on the reader's division. A note in the margins of the Directorate's working copy, in a hand identified as that of Clerk-Binder Amund, reads only: "Both. Neither. Ask the porter."

A more serious dispute concerns Article 61, which forbids the touching of "anything that has not been touched before." The prohibition was intended for fresh acquisitions. It has since been read, by the Silent Index's annotators, as forbidding first contact of any kind, on the reasoning that every first touch is a first touch. The Index has declined to rule. Its annotators have noted, in the margin of the relevant page, that the Guideline as read would prohibit its own application.

"Where an instruction cannot be followed without violating itself, the instruction is to be followed and the violation recorded under the same article number, prefixed with a dagger."

— Revised Guidelines for Citation Hierarchy, Annex Ω-7, clause 9

Prescribed Conditions

Readers working under the Tactile Guidelines must observe a standard set of conditions. Gloves are worn at all times on floors above the ninth gallery, regardless of the holding's Claudius value. Floors below Level 0 fall instead under the Provisional Guidelines for Sub-Terranean Holdings, which supersede Articles 1 through 40 entirely and which the Bureau has never reconciled with the rest of the series. Ramps giving access to reading rooms are built to the standard gradient of 6.0 degrees, as specified by the Provisional Indexing Guidelines; where a room cannot be reached by such a ramp, the holding is carried to the reader instead, and the carry is logged.

Air must be still during contact; a holding touched in a draught is to be considered touched invalidly and re-touched when the air settles. Scent is governed separately, under the Olfactory/Tactile Vacuums, and a reader who reports the absence of an expected smell while handling a holding must cease handling and file a Vacuum Notice before continuing. In practice, the Bureau notes, most readers file the notice afterward. The Bureau has not chosen to press the point.

Criticism and Current Practice

The Guidelines have been criticised from within the archive for being "a hand extended into a room it has not been shown" — the phrase is Wrenne of the Second Scriptorium's, from her 4,501 commentary on the intake protocols, and it is quoted chiefly by those who wish the series revised. Defenders, among them Amund, hold that a hand extended into an unshown room is exactly what the archive requires, since the room will be shown only by the extending. This position is not recorded as official. The Apparent Concordance Contradiction between the Eleventh and the Nineteenth Concordance touches on the matter at 44 without settling it.

The eighty-nine articles are currently under review by the Bureau of Provisional Indexing, which has announced no completion date. The Receding Protocols have been invoked once, in 4,479, when a draft of Article 90 was withdrawn after three days on the ground that it repeated Article 2. A note on the withdrawal docket, unsigned, reads: "It repeated it better." No Article 90 has been proposed since. In the meantime, readers are directed to the series as it stands, and reminded that the Guidelines are binding only when read; they are, however, read on every floor that has a floor.