Verified Permanence

Definition

Verified Permanence is the condition signified by Verified Permanence status, a holding-level certification indicating that a catalogued item is fully verified and permanently established. The condition is distinct from, and administrative rivals to, Certificate of Verified Absence; the two are held by Concordance 743, Annex 9 to be mutually exclusive except where they are not, a clause that has generated more hours of committee work than any other in the Tower's modern record. Verified Permanence is not conferred by the Librarians. It is conferred by the Bureau of Hypothetical Durability, an office whose name is frequently mistaken for ironic and which maintains that it is not. Petitioners for the status address the Bureau in triplicate; the Bureau replies in duplicate; the missing third copy is understood to be the copy that attests to the permanence.

History

The earliest recorded use of the term appears in the ledgers of the Commission for Archival Permanence, where it is used loosely to describe shelving that had stopped moving. For several centuries the phrase carried no certification weight, and holdings were described as permanent in the same casual register as they were described as damp. The turning point came with the Principle of Permanence, which held that permanence could be asserted but not assumed — a ruling later reversed, then reversed again, then attributed to a recension nobody could locate. The formal instrument is Concordance 743, Annex 9, which established Verified Permanence as a discrete status and simultaneously created the dual framework with Certificate of Verified Absence. The Annex was drafted during the winter of the Third Scriptorium Fire, and its margins contain four separate handwritings arguing about whether "permanent" was meant absolutely or administratively. The Consortium of Verified Copyists holds the authoritative transcription; two rival transcriptions exist on floors whose numbers do not appear in any accessible index.

Conferral

Conferral follows the sequence set out in Ordinance 4: a holding is entered, its entry is itself certified permanent, and the holding inherits the certification of its entry unless the entry is subsequently amended, in which case the holding's status is held in abeyance pending review by the Chamber of Verified Function. In practice the sequence has been known to run backwards. The most cited instance concerns a holding on the 812th floor whose entry preceded its existence by eleven years and whose Status Field was marked "established" throughout. The Office of Architectural Permanence maintains that the structure housing a holding contributes to its permanence, and has twice petitioned for the certification of stairwells. Both petitions were denied by the Bureau of Verified Topography on the grounds that a stairwell, being continuous with floors that change number, cannot be permanently established without also permanently establishing those floors. The dispute is unresolved and is expected to remain so.

Material requirements

Holdings achieving Verified Permanence are required to render their survey data and boundary maps onto Vellum of Permanence. The requirement is stated absolutely in Concordance 743, Annex 9 and qualified in three later annexes. The Vellum itself is produced by a single workshop; the workshop's location is recorded differently in each of its own ledgers, which are kept in parallel columns and never reconciled. Readers consulting the Vellum of Permanence in person are reminded that gloves are to be removed at the door and replaced at the threshold, and that the interval between the two must not be used to turn pages.

Disputed scope

Scholars disagree on whether Verified Permanence describes a property of the holding or a property of the record describing it. The first position holds that the Atlas of Silent Geographies achieved permanence because it was, in fact, permanent; the second holds that it achieved permanence because a clerk with the correct seal said so, and that the difference between these accounts is not merely academic but is, in the estimation of the Commission for Archival Permanence, the entire subject. A third position, associated with the Edict HDP-7/22 ("On Provisional Permanence"), holds that all permanence is provisional and that the certification records the provisional period's expiration rather than its nullification. Edict HDP-7/22 has been cited four times in support of holdings that were subsequently lost, which its detractors regard as confirmation and its authors regard as coincidence. The matter is entangled with the Paradox of the Verified Holding, which arises when a single holding carries both Verified Permanence and a Certificate of Verified Absence — a state that Concordance 743, Annex 9 forbids and, in the same paragraph, provides the mechanism for. The Atlas of Silent Geographies was the first inferred holding to attain it.

See also

• Verified Permanence status
• Principle of Permanence
• Bureau of Hypothetical Durability
• Vellum of Permanence
• Certificate of Verified Absence
• The Paradox of the Verified Holding