Controversial Books in the Public Library: A Comparative Survey of Holdings of Gay-Related Children's Picture Books
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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 it