Tier-1 (Physical Hazard)

Tier-1 (Physical Hazard) is the lowest and oldest of the hazard tiers maintained by the Registry of Protocols, reserved for holdings whose danger is exercised upon matter rather than meaning. A Tier-1 holding may fall, burn, crush, corrode, spill, or strike; it does not alter the reader's certainties, does not migrate across archival boundaries, and does not duplicate itself. It is, in the phrasing of the Registry's preamble, "dangerous in the manner of a shelf, and no more."

Establishment of the tier is conventionally dated to the ratification of Concordance I, Clause 9, which fixed the classifications now in use and provided that no holding should be raised to a higher tier without an instrument of elevation signed by two Librarians and countersigned by a third who had not read the holding. The third signature is still required.

Definition and scope

Tier-1 covers the purely physical: corrosions, collapses, ignition, sharpness, weight, and the ordinary malice of unstable stacking. It is distinguished from Tier Gamma by the absence of any effect on the ordering of knowledge, and from Tier 2 by the absence of any potentiality not already present at the time of cataloguing. A Tier-1 hazard does what it does immediately and visibly. It has no latency, or if it has, the Registry considers the latency a matter for the holding's custodian and not for the tier.

Acoustic latency is sometimes mistaken for a Tier-1 concern. It is not; it is an Archival Hazard in its own right and is answered by the Resonant Damping Mesh rather than by the physical protocols.

The elevation pressure of the ninth and tenth recensions

Following the ninth recension, which reclassified conceptual seepage under Emergency Clause 22 as a Tier-3 Phenomenological Hazard, a pressure arose within the Archivist Cadre to align the physical tier upward by analogy. The argument, advanced in the Memorial on Uniform Severity (Librarian Ossia Vane, 1022), held that a falling shelf and a seeping certainty are alike in being unanticipated, and that the difference in tier was a difference of taste rather than of substance. The Registry rejected the Memorial by a margin of nine to four, on the ground that "the reader may step aside from a falling shelf, and cannot step aside from a falling certainty" (Registry Minutes, 1022, entry 14).

The question was reopened in the tenth recension and reopened badly. A block of Tier-1 holdings was elevated to Tier-2 over the course of a single winter on the strength of Anachronistic Seepage findings that later proved to be misread labels. The misclassified holdings spent four years under elevated handling protocols and were restored to Tier-1 in the Roll of Restored Designations, which is still consulted whenever an elevation is proposed.

Handling and the Brooks incident

Tier-1 handling is assigned to the Archivist Cadre under the Registry of Protocols and requires no special instrument beyond gloves, a second pair of hands, and the completion of Form 3-P, Notice of Intent to Move a Physically Dangerous Holding. Form 3-P is one page. It is rarely completed.

The most cited failure of Tier-1 protocol is the Brooks incident of Floor 2214. Archivist Thessaly Brooks moved a Tier-1 armillary block of 41 kilograms without the second pair of hands, on the reasoning that the block was already on the floor and could fall no further. The block was in fact balanced on a hinged panel over a stairwell. It fell further. The floor was closed for eleven days and the stairwell for four months. The subsequent inquiry produced the finding, still cited, that "the physical tier is not a statement that the holding has finished falling" (Inquiry Report 2214, §3).

"No holding is to be considered spent because it is currently at rest. Rest is a state which physical objects may enter and from which they may be released without notice."

— Registry of Protocols, Annex C, §2

Dispute: the boundary with the Zone

There is an unresolved disagreement as to whether a Tier-1 holding carried into a Zone of Epistemic Hazard remains Tier-1. The Zone's establishing instrument provides that holdings within it are elevated to at least Tier-2 automatically, without instrument or signature. The Registry maintains that this automatic elevation cannot apply to physical hazards, since a Zone of Epistemic Hazard does nothing to the stiffness of a beam. The Office of Zonal Compliance maintains the opposite, and has twice issued notices against Archivist Courtenay Ash for carrying a Tier-1 stone plumb-bob through a Zone on Floor 3311. The stone did not fall. The Office holds that this is irrelevant, since the elevation concerns its status and not its angle.

A note on the lowest tiers

Below Tier-1 there is no tier. Proposals for a Tier-0, covering holdings dangerous only to the careless, were tabled twice and withdrawn twice, in both cases by the same Librarian, Marn III, who observed that the series ought to have a floor and that this was the one. Articles occasionally catalogued under a hypothetical Tier-0 are to be treated as Tier-1. The north stair, as a general rule, is not to be used for the movement of anything in this tier after the lamps are lit; the reason is on the wall at the foot of it, and is legible.