Lotty Summers, Library Assistant – University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
I have always been somewhat of a classification ‘nerd’. Prior to working in health libraries, I held a fascination for the Dewey Decimal System and memorized many of the common class marks, both for retrieving information and classifying it. Arriving in health libraries, I had a new system to learn in Wessex and hence, once again, acquired the skill of knowing where to locate a subject, mostly without consulting the catalogue. So, when the opportunity came up to join a group working on developments to the Wessex classification system, I jumped at the chance.
With my interest and skills, I felt I could make a valid contribution to the group and was pleased to see there were no limits on the level of professional standing needed to join. I felt encouraged by the openness of the project in deciding which areas could be tackled first. After working on equality and diversity initiatives in my last job, I was pleased to see LGBTQ+, Race and Ethnicity and Neurodiversity being among the first areas to be reformed. The LGBTQ+ (Pride) sub-group discussions led to major changes such as moving sexual crimes away from sexual orientations, gender and relationships into the schedule for psychiatry. Working in the sub-group was a positive and interesting experience where I learned a lot.
In 2023, I had the pleasure of ticking two things off my professional bucket list. Firstly, co-presenting a poster on the project with the Oversight Group Lead, Jason – this gave me the opportunity to work on an abstract, develop an idea for a poster and present it at the CILIP Metadata Discovery Conference in Birmingham. Although presenting was daunting, it was a great experience that led to networking with other library workers, who hope to work on similar projects in their own organizations and consortia. Secondly, we converted the presentation into an article that will be published in a special conference issue for the journal’s catalogue and index.
After participating in a couple of other sub-groups, I will be chairing my first one this year to look at new Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and consider which ones could be integrated into Wessex. I hope this will develop my chairing skills as well as increase my medical knowledge, useful for helping library users search for information. The Oversight Group is also discussing the areas in Wessex that we might like to look at next and further sub-groups may develop as the project progresses. There is also a suggestion of a sub-group reviewing ideas from Wessex users outside of the project.
Though the Oversight Group has only been running for just over a year, it is already achieving wider change in the health sector, with CINAHL using our changes as a platform to alter their own subject headings – a partnership that will continue along with the project. We will also improve the experience of using Wessex for library staff with the implementation of a thesaurus management tool, PoolParty, being in development right now.
I am proud to be a small part of the Wessex Classification Scheme Oversight Group and can’t wait to see what else we will achieve as this project continues.
Health Libraries Group 