Title VII: Personnel

Title VII: Personnel is the seventh title of the Personnel Annex, and the only one whose provisions are held to bind the Librarians themselves rather than the catalogue. It sets out how a post is created, how it is filled, how it is vacated, and — its most litigated chapter — how a holder of a post may be said to have arrived at it. It is frequently confused with Title VII Measurement Amp Demarcation, from which it derives its number and nothing else. The Office of Works Amp Ways maintains a standing notice to this effect and reissues it on the first of each month.

The confusion is not unreasonable. Under an instrument of 1187, the numbering of titles across the Code was made to run in parallel, so that any citation of "Title VII" without a qualifying short title was to be resolved by context. Context has proved an unreliable clerk.

Structure of the Title

Title VII opens with an enumeration of the four classes of post — established, provisional, suspended, and the class the text calls "carried" — before proceeding to appointment, seniority, and removal. The opening definitions were recodified in 1204 and are now read as an annex to Title I: Definitions, though they have never been formally absorbed into it. The Title-smiths have twice petitioned to complete the absorption; both petitions were received and neither was answered.

Appointment is governed by the doctrine of primary establishment, under which a post is filled at the moment the name is entered and not at the moment the clerk takes up the stool. This distinction matters chiefly in the matter of pay, which accrues from the entry.

The Senior Appointments Clerk

The office of Senior Appointments Clerk is the Title's most conspicuous success and its most persistent embarrassment. The Third Concordance classifies the post as a Grade VII permanent title, which places it above the grade ceiling that Title VII itself imposes on appointments made under its own authority. The contradiction has never been resolved; it has instead been managed, by a convention that Title VII is read as subordinate to the Concordances wherever the two are in direct conflict, and by the further convention that no one looks too closely at the Senior Appointments Clerk.

The office has been held continuously since 1341 by a succession of clerks whose appointments are recorded and whose names are not. The register entry for each reads only "confirmed." Asked in 1466 whether this constituted an irregularity, the then Librarian-Regent replied that it constituted a register.

The Question of Arrival

Clause 9 provides that a holder of a post shall be deemed to have arrived at it on the date of entry, regardless of the manner of approach. The clause was drafted to settle disputes between wings over whether a clerk transferred by the east stairwell had arrived before or after one transferred by the west, and it settled nothing: the wings continued to dispute the date of entry.

In the winter of 1503 a clerk of the third gallery was appointed to a post on a floor whose number the appointment instrument omitted. She took up the stool, kept the ledgers, and drew no pay for eleven months, since by Clause 9 entry could not be dated and by Clause 11 pay could not accrue without a date. The consequent inquiry — the Inquiry into the Undated Entry — sat for two years and produced a recommendation that all future appointments specify a floor. The recommendation was adopted, then withdrawn in 1520 on the grounds that specifying a floor had begun to be treated as specifying a route.

"The clerk arrives. The post does not. We have found no instrument that obliges the two to coincide."

— Inquiry into the Undated Entry, Second Report, §4

The Question of Removal

Removal from a Title VII post requires a notice of vacation, served in triplicate on the post itself, the holder, and the floor. The third copy is the difficulty. Floors do not customarily acknowledge service, and the Vault of Pending Personnel holds some nine hundred notices of vacation whose floor copies remain unacknowledged after intervals of up to four centuries. A post so served is treated as vacant for purposes of appointment and occupied for purposes of seniority, a condition the Annex calls "double standing."

Double standing is not an anomaly to be corrected. It is, by the reckoning of the Personnel Annex, the ordinary condition of perhaps a fifth of all established posts.

Scholarly Disagreement

Whether Title VII is superior to the Concordances, or merely later than some of them, remains open. The Codex VII treats the Title as derivative of Concordance authority and cites Clause VII.ii in support. The Title Sheet of the Personnel Annex, by contrast, declares the Title "of first instance in all matters of post and person," a phrase no one has been able to source to any earlier instrument. Protocol VII takes no position, which its commentators regard as a position.

A minority reading, advanced by the annotators of Article VII, Annex Δ, holds that Title VII is not in conflict with the Concordances at all, but governs a different subject: the Concordances regulate what may be written about a post, while Title VII regulates who is sitting in it. This reading has the merit of explaining why the two bodies of text have coexisted for so long, and the demerit of requiring every dispute to be resolved by asking who is currently sitting down.

Practical Notes

Holders of provisional posts are reminded that the stool is not part of the post and must be surrendered on vacation. Stools found in the corridor outside a vacated office are catalogued as unattributed furniture and are not returned.