Validation

Validation is the Tower-wide practice of certifying that a door is internally consistent: that it opens onto what it claims to open onto, that its frame closes, and that its naming agrees with its number. It is the most cited and least agreed-upon activity of the Librarians, and the surviving record of it is almost entirely composed of disagreements. The Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Edition, defines validation as "a certification of internal consistency, and of nothing further" (Manual, ch. 1, §3). The same Manual devotes its remaining eleven chapters to the further things that have, in practice, been certified.

Validation is distinct from ingress. A door may be valid and never opened; a door may be opened, daily, by hundreds of persons, and remain unvalidated. The Bureau of Ingress Validation is empowered to issue a Provisional Validation Certificate only upon completion of Initial Validation — the rule is stated in the Bureau's founding instrument and has been restated, in slightly different words, in every recension since. It is this dependence on the Validation Pathway that makes validation a precondition rather than a convenience.

The Procedure

The Pathway proceeds in three stages: Pre-Validation, Initial Validation, and the recursive confirmation described in the Principle of Recursive Validation. Pre-Validation is conducted at the door; Initial Validation is conducted at a desk, from the door's papers; the recursive stage is conducted, in theory, at both, and is the stage at which most disputes arise.

The stage is not a metaphor. The Axiom of Recursive Validation requires that any act of validation be capable of being re-entered, and that re-entry must produce the same result without reference to the original validator's notes. In practice this means that a valid door must be valid a second time, at a different desk, in the presence of a witness who has not been told what result to expect. A door on the seventeenth storey was validated eleven times in the winter of the cold quarter, each validation passing, before a clerk observed that the eleven certificates cited one another in a closed ring and pointed at no door at all. The resulting Validation Chain inquiry ran for two years and produced three Concordance amendments, none of which addressed the ring.

"No instrument shall certify itself, nor shall it certify any instrument that certifies it, nor any instrument at one remove from that instrument, however diligent the remove."

— Twelfth Concordance, Annex 4, cl. 7

The clause was withdrawn eleven days later under the Sixteenth Concordance, which noted only that the Twelfth had "created difficulties of ordinary counting" (Sixteenth Concordance, preamble).

The Dispute Over Sequence

Scholars disagree, sharply and without visible end, over whether validation precedes or follows provisional certification. The Precept of Recursive Validation is read by the Bureau of Recursive Validation as placing validation first in all cases, the certificate being the receipt rather than the permission. The Bureau of Ingress Validation reads the same Precept as describing a cycle in which first and second position are not distinguishable — a reading set out at length in its own circular of the 40th year, which cites the Cycle of Validation and declines to cite the Precept directly.

The practical consequence is small, since a door that fails validation is not opened regardless of which paper is dated earlier. The archival consequence is not small. Two complete sets of standard forms circulate, one arranged validation-first and one certificate-first, and a filing clerk who binds them in the wrong order commits an offence under the Fourth Concordance that carries a fine of nine measures of lamp oil. The fine is collected.

The Bureau of Validation and Its Dissolution

Until the dissolution, validation was administered by The Bureau of Validation, whose seal — a key within a key — still appears on forms issued after its dissolution, because no successor instrument was ever specified for its replacement. The Eleventh Librarian dissolved the Bureau following a review of its own validation records, which the Bureau had certified as complete. The review had found the records to be complete, and to consist entirely of certifications of other records of the same kind.

Authority passed to the Bureau of Recursive Validation, and there it has remained, contested but uncontradicted. The Directorate of Validation & Verification within the Bureau of Recursive Affairs operationalizes the practice day to day; its clerks are fond of saying that they do not validate doors, only the paperwork of doors, which is the same thing and ought not to be written down. It has been written down four times.

Notable Failures and the Margins

Validation does not fail loudly. The notorious cases are those in which a door passed every stage and was found, on a subsequent audit, to open onto a landing numbered with a number it did not have. The audit of the eighth gallery — conducted under the Manual of Validation Procedure, Appendix 9, which permits auditors to work without announcement — recorded eleven such doors in a single corridor and no validators present.

Two standing readings of the practice are worth distinguishing. The narrow reading, associated with the Validation and Certification commentary, holds validation to be a certification of the door alone and refuses to consider its destination. The broad reading, associated with the Cycle of Validation and with most of the Directorate's internal memoranda, holds that a door and what it opens onto cannot be validated in separation, since the one is the other's only evidence. Neither reading has been adopted by Concordance. Both circulate in bound form. A visiting reader wishing to consult either is asked to sign the register in pencil only.

Inventory of the Standard Instruments

The following instruments are currently in force, in the sense that no one has been found to declare them otherwise:

The Validation Pathway — procedure, three stages, amended twice at the level of the second stage.
The Manual of Validation Procedure, 4th Edition — definitions; the 3rd Edition is retained in the stacks for comparison and is reported to differ at ch. 9.
The Precept of Recursive Validation — standing, unamended, disputed as to sequence.
The Axiom of Recursive Validation — formal statement of re-entry.
The Validation and Certification commentary — unofficial, bound, unsealed.

A fifth edition of the Manual has been announced in each of the last fourteen years. It is presently at the desk of a clerk on the landing that does not appear in the numbering, which is itself pending validation.