POSTERS U.S. state libraries as strong institutions: Supporting justice for LGBTQ+ patrons? Joseph Winberry 1 | Bharat Mehra 2 1 College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 2 School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama Correspondence Joseph Winberry, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Abstract One hundred and ninety-three countries have ratified the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development outlining 17 goals to promote prosperity of people and the planet in a peaceful and sustainable way. Despite hate crimes and marginalization around the world, LGBTQ+ communities are missing from conceptualization and description of these goals. This poster rec- ognizes state libraries in the United States as potentially strong institutions to promote peace and justice for sexual minorities (i.e., Sustainable Development Goal 16). It presents illustrative examples from a website content analysis of four state libraries in Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, and Texas, regions that the Human Rights Campaign has recognized as exemplar in six law and policy development areas (i.e., parenting, relationship recognition/religious refusal, hate crimes and criminal justice, youth, and health and safety). The findings— selectively described in the narrative and fully viewable through a weblink— serve as a first step towards identifying best practices that state libraries can take to better serve LGBTQ+ patrons. KEYWORDS LGBTQ+, state libraries, United Nations, website content analysis 1 | INTRODUCTION Goal 16 of the United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustain- able Development calls on nations to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institu- tions (United Nations, 2015). Currently, acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/ questioning (LGBTQ+) people is uneven at best (Browne & Nash, 2014; Mehra, 2019). For example, The Human Rights Campaign (HRC's, 2019) State Equality Index Report indicates how state of residency can dramat- ically impact the rights of American LGBTQ+ people by spotlighting specific progress in Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, and Texas. The HRC report identified numerous metrics for mea- suring key U. S. state law and policy developments for LGBTQ+ people (e.g., parenting, relationship recogni- tion/religious refusal, hate crimes and criminal justice, youth, and health and safety). However, conspicuous in its absence is significant analysis of the role that informa- tion can play as a form of empowerment and change agency (e.g., information seeking and information use) in describing related resources and services. This despite information and/or libraries' significance in the coming out process (Mehra & Braquet, 2011), as agents of human DOI: 10.1002/pra2.360 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology October 25-29, 2020. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license Proc Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2020;57:e360. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pra2 1 of 3 https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.360