Misdirected enquiries

Misdirected enquiries are requests received by the reading room which concern nothing it holds. They are transcribed into a register kept apart from the ordinary enquiry book, and are not answered. The register was opened at the point at which answering them was discontinued, and the reason recorded for the discontinuation is that the answers were producing further enquiries of the same kind.

Transcription

Entries are copied as received: spelling uncorrected, punctuation as found, and sentences that break off left broken off. The instruction to transcribe rather than summarise was added after a summarised entry was found to have removed the only part of an enquiry that recurred elsewhere.

Three examples

The following are given in the order in which they were entered.

The first reads, in full, "Hard-Fi" "Escobar" Wakefield. It is the same sequence, in the same order, as three consecutive entries in the log of the Mirror unit, and the enquiry gives no indication of what is being asked about it. The correspondence was noticed by the attendant who had made both transcriptions, and would not otherwise have been noticed at all.

The second consists of the single word uphologue. It is not a word in any language consulted. It has arrived nine times, from nine senders, over a period during which nothing was published that would account for it, and no sender has enclosed anything further.

The third reads why was chip potts crying when darques henchmen put him in the aslyum de, and ends there. It concerns, so far as the attendant could establish, characters in two different children's films, neither of which the reading room holds anything about, and about which it would have nothing to say in any case. The entry is retained under the transcription rule: the misspelling and the unfinished last word are as received.

It is entered rather than discarded because the sender's hand is the same in two other enquiries, both concerning the school papers, and both answerable.

Standing

The register is not catalogued and is not offered to readers. It is kept, in the words of the note that opens it, because an enquiry records that someone believed the answer to be here, and that belief is a fact about the collection even where its object is not.

The same reasoning is given for retaining the Composite sheet, and the parallel has been drawn explicitly: both are documents whose interest lies entirely in their having arrived.

Objections

It is objected that the register is a collection of errors and that treating it as material invites the Kilometre reading problem in a stronger form, since any recurring string can be matched to something if the corpus of things to match against is large enough. The nine appearances of uphologue are cited by both sides: as evidence that something is being referred to, and as evidence that nine people can make the same error.

No position has been taken. The attendant who opened the register recorded that she did not expect the question to be settled and did not think it needed to be, the entries being of the same use either way.

Status

Current. Entries continue to arrive at a rate the register does not record, no count having been kept before it was opened and none being kept since.

See also

• Route document — Composite sheet, Kilometre reading
• Mirror unit — Composite sheet, Mirror unit
• Composite sheet — Composite sheet
• Kilometre reading — Kilometre reading
• Levernet Rhapsody — Composite sheet
• External ordering
• Herman James
• Manfred