Controversial Books in the Public Library: A Comparative Survey of Holdings of Gay-Related Children's Picture Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines an area of book publishing that has generated some controversy for public libraries. A checklist of thirty English-language children's picture books with gay characters or gay-related contents is presented. "Picture book" is broadly defined to include highly illustrated works of various degrees of difficulty which are directed to an audience aged from approximately four to eleven. Titles were checked against the catalogs of 101 public library systems to determine number of titles and number of copies of titles held. Libraries were drawn from each of the fifty American states and ten Canadian provinces, with some representation also from New Zealand, Australia, and Britain. Comparisons of holdings among library systems show large differences. Similarly, comparisons among titles show some works to be much more widely held than others, and, in support of Serebnick's earlier findings, there is a pattern of increase in the number of holding libraries when there is an increase in number of mainstream library journal reviews. The rating scheme applied to the reviews from six mainstream journals offers some guidance to the reader and highlights divergence of critical opinion with regard to some titles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".