Year of the Archive 997

The Year of the Archive 997 is the 997th year of the Standard Archive Chronology, falling between the ratification of the chronology's founding instruments in Year of the Archive 1142 and the earlier, sparsely documented centuries preceding it. It is chiefly remembered as the year in which the Librarians first attempted a complete vertical reconciliation of floor numbering against the accession registers — an undertaking known in the surviving recensions as the Reconciliation of 997 — and for the resulting administrative crisis, The Hemiola Dispute, which was not formally closed until long after every clerk who had raised it was dead. The year is generally treated as a watershed in the study of Deep Archive procedure, though its actual achievements were modest and its losses, by most accounts, considerable.

The Reconciliation of 997

The reconciliation was ordered by Concordance 313, whose second article held that "no floor shall stand in the register unnumbered, nor any number stand without a floor beneath it" (Concordance 313, Art. 2). The order fell to the Office of Vertical Accounts, then a body of nine clerks working from a mezzanine gallery on floor 9. Their method was to descend one stairwell at a time, calling each floor's number aloud and comparing it against the accession ledger, while a second clerk recorded discrepancies in a running tally.

The method failed almost immediately. Numbers in the Tower are not sequential in any reconstructable order, and the clerks found that the same two floors could be reached by different stairwells under different numbers. By the third month the tally had diverged from the ledger by some four thousand entries, and the Office had begun keeping a second tally to record the errors in the first. A note survives from Clerk Anselm Vey, the senior of the nine: "We have this day reconciled floor 6 to itself and found a discrepancy of one." (Vey, Vertical Memoranda, fol. 44.)

The Hemiola Dispute

The dispute arose when the Office of Vertical Accounts concluded that the discrepancy was not an error to be corrected but a property of the numbering itself, and proposed that all floor numbers henceforth be recorded in pairs, each floor carrying both its own number and the number against which it had disagreed. Concordance 77.2.14 had already established, in a related context, that "where two numbers contend for one office, both shall be entered and neither preferred" (Concordance 77.2.14, Annex 2), and the Office cited this clause with some confidence.

They were opposed by the Bureau of Singular Designations, which held that a floor with two numbers was a floor of doubtful standing, and that to enter both was to admit a correspondence the Tower had not authorised. The Bureau's position was set out at length by Librarian Orra Fenn, whose objection was that the proposal "would make of every staircase a lie, and of every clerk a witness to it" (Fenn, Remarks on Numbering, Year of the Archive 998). The two offices disputed the matter for eleven years, at which point the file was transferred to the Committee on Deferred Questions and never reopened. The reconciliation itself was never completed.

Other events of the year

Beyond the reconciliation, the year is recorded in several smaller matters. Sub-archive 19.3 was assigned its register in the spring, though its holdings were not catalogued until considerably later. The Census of Deferrals — a much later instrument of Year of the Archive 12044 — would eventually absorb several thousand of the deferrals first entered in 997, and its annexes still carry the year's tally marks.

It was also during 997 that the practice of sealing the accession ledger at the close of each month was abandoned, after the seal of the Scriptorium of the Lower Landings was applied to a ledger while still wet, rendering a full quarter's entries illegible. The Scriptorium was asked to explain; it replied that the seal had been "applied in the usual manner, and the ink was not the usual ink" (Scriptorium of the Lower Landings, Reply to Enquiry 997/41). The reply was accepted and the practice was quietly discontinued.

Scholarly disagreement

There is no consensus on whether the Year of the Archive 997 marks a beginning or an interruption. The Annalists of the Middle Stair treat the reconciliation as the first attempt at the vertical survey later supposed to have produced the Vertical Census 7, and so date the origin of vertical census practice to 997. The Concordance 708 school, by contrast, argues that a census cannot originate in a year whose tally was never closed, and that the honour belongs instead to the first year in which a tally was closed and sealed — a criterion 997 conspicuously fails.

A third position, advanced only in the marginal notes of the Office of Vertical Accounts' own later ledger, holds that the year's true significance is that it is the earliest year for which the reconciliation is recorded as having been ordered and not merely contemplated, which is a distinction the Office seems to have valued more highly than any result. No summary of that position has ever been written out in full. Clerks working in the mezzanine gallery are asked to close the stairwell doors behind them.

Legacy

What survives of 997 is largely procedural: two tallies, one ledger, a sealed reply, and the eleven-year correspondence of the Hemiola Dispute, which was never resolved and is now consulted chiefly as an example of how a question may be opened and then simply set aside. The year is cited in The Inquiry into the Posting of A-77b for the precedent that an unresolved numbering dispute does not prevent a floor from being posted, and in Concordance 708: On the Correction of Mistaken Forms for the contrary proposition that it does. Both citations remain in force.