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The policies of the American Library Association (ALA) concerning the concept of intellectual freedom are embodied in the Library Bill of Rights, the association's official statement on free access to libraries and library materials. The Library Bill of Rights is a brief, deceptively simple document that has provoked constant debate and reinterpretation since its adoption by ALA almost 40 years ago.

In the March 1983 issue of the Moral Majority Report, Jerry Falwell, one of the leaders of the new right movement, leveled a very serious charge at librarians: they are failing to include “conservative” materials in their collections. According to him,

Reports on a comparison of the 1992 Lambda Book Award titles and a sample of titles reviewed in the Lambda Book Report with a control group of titles listed in Publishers Weekly, “Forecasts”. Finds that while the Lambda Award titles received about the same number of reviews as the control group titles, the LBR sample received significantly fewer reviews. However, both samples of gay/lesbian/ bisexual books are held in significantly fewer OCLC libraries than are the control titles. Examines the content of reviews of sample books and finds that they show no apparent bias on the part of the reviewers.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the overall quality of the Louisville Free Public Library's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender collection.

The study implements an inductive check‐list method. Where other check‐lists compare a list to the collection, ignoring the number of items which do not appear on the list, an inductive method takes a sample of the entire collection, and compares it with several evaluative lists, demonstrating what percentage of the collection is not considered “desirable” by common evaluative lists.

The results found that 31.9 percent of the LFPL's GLBT collection can be found in the evaluative lists used. Previous inductive evaluations suggest that this number indicates a quality core GLBT collection.

A sample collection was chosen using GLBT‐related subject headings; however, evidence shows that a portion of the actual GLBT collection (perhaps as much as 37.5 percent) lack appropriate subject access control. This results in a potentially flawed sample.

This study provides public librarians with a standard by which they can evaluate their GLBT collections and their library's attempt to meet the needs of a frequently underrepresented minority.

Very few inductive evaluations have been published, and almost none has been published studying GLBT collections. The paper attempts to fill that gap, and provide a deeper standard by which GLBT collections can be evaluated.

NANCY ALLEN is Communications Librarian at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where she has previously held the positions of Assistant Undergraduate Librarian and Reserve Book Librarian. She earned her M.S. in Library Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Ms. Allen's writings have appeared in American Libraries, Film Library Quarterly, and Journalism Quarterly. She is author of Film Study Collections: A Guide to Their Development and Use.

ROBERT J. ARMAO served for six years as an aquatic biologist for an environmental consulting firm before earning his M.L.S. at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. He received a B.S. from Fordham University and studied marine science at Long Island University.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.