What belongs in a yearbook chapter, and what belongs in the annex

A first-edition yearbook fails in a predictable way. The working group treats every extract as a chapter because nobody wants to tell a department that its table is an annex. The bound book then contains eighteen “chapters”, half of which are three rows and a pie.

A chapter, in the sense we use at the Batumi desk, is a set of figures that a named official is prepared to explain without fetching a second file. Employment, waste collection, school places, executed capital — these can be chapters if the register exists and the cut-off date is written down. A list of every cultural event that received a small grant is an annex. So is a suppression log. So is a classification change that affected two years.

The test we use in the inventory workshop is blunt. We ask who will sit in the sakrebulo if a member points at the figure. If the answer is “we will send a note later”, the table does not open the book. It can still be printed at the back, with the same source note as if it were a chapter. Hiding it is not the aim; protecting the reader’s patience is.

Annexes are not a punishment. They are where we put cells suppressed below ten observations, broken series, and the tourism-spend file that mixes a tax take with a chamber of commerce estimate. Leaving that mix in chapter 1 is how a mayor ends up defending a number that was never a number.

When last year’s volume already exists, we follow its chapter order unless a chapter has died. Killing a chapter is a political act and should be done in writing, with a sentence in the introduction. Quietly moving it to the annex because the extract is late is how you get two contradictory employment figures in one sitting.