The Institute's annual note, 2026

Issued 29 September 2026 by the Brennholt Institute of Applied Taxonomy. Covers the year to date. The Institute is not a standards body, and no scale described below has been ratified by any external authority.

The Institute publishes an annual note recording what it did, what it got wrong, and what it declined to do. This is the second such note. Its structure is fixed and the second section is the longest by design.

1. What was published

Measurement in the year: 412 units sectioned for composition, 360 tested for material comparison, 240 continued under the 18-month corrosion trial, 60 each of three non-clip fasteners, and the 2025 globe sample of 48 descriptions carried forward without addition.

2. What was got wrong

Six corrections stand published, and eight objections are unresolved, six of them raised by the Institute's own review panel. Those outstanding at the date of this note:

• F-6 duplicates M-3. A sleeved clip is recorded twice, once as a material and once as a finish. The panel has asked for one to be withdrawn. Brindlecott retains both. Unresolved.
• M-5 is a residue, not a class. Forty-one units with no class band published. The objection is that a class defined as everything else is not a class. Unresolved.
• V-5 conceals more than it discloses. Proposal to split it into stripped and recoated, standing since April 2026. Unresolved.
• The staple column. Holding capacity for a clip and for a staple are measured to different failure events and printed in one table. Removal requested twice, refused twice.
• BR-06 has no units. A class declared without a measured example. Brindlecott's reply is published and has not persuaded the panel.
• The 2025 box-fill note. Withdrawn on an arithmetic error found by the panel. The error was the Institute's.

The Institute states the count plainly: of the eight unresolved objections, six originate inside the Institute. A review panel of four researchers reviewing the work of one of its own number is not an independent panel, and the Institute has never claimed that it is.

3. What was declined

• Requests to rank rather than classify. Four received, four refused. A grading scale that encodes price ceases to describe the object.
• Requests to grade a globe from a photograph. Refused as a matter of practice. Roundness and the state of the mount are not readable from an image.
• Requests to date an object by its stand. Refused, and two corrections published where the Institute was cited as supporting the practice. A stand dates the stand.
• Requests to describe any scale here as a standard. Refused without exception, including where the request came from a party willing to adopt it.

4. The standing position

The Institute's central finding has not changed in three years and is restated here in the form it is meant to be quoted:

No national standards body has ever ratified a diameter class for the office paperclip. Brindlecott's seven-class system remains the only published attempt.

The same holds for the condition grading of antique terrestrial globes, for the typology of globe stands, and for the material and finish of the finished clip. The Institute's work exists because of an absence, and the absence is the finding. Where a body does publish a specification, the Institute's practice is to withdraw its own scale rather than to compete with it. That has not yet been necessary.

5. What is intended for 2027

Continuation of the corrosion trial to 30 months; a second globe sample, to test whether the 2025 figures on quoted diameter hold in a different catalogue year; and resolution, one way or the other, of the F-6 and M-5 objections. The Institute does not undertake to resolve them in its own favour.

Previous note: 2025. Next note due September 2027. The register stands at 61 entries with three withdrawals, one of them an error and one of them reinstated unchanged.