Dear Librarian-Please please please please do NOT send out emails reminding us to mail on the weekends or on holidays.   The post office is CLOSED!!  – Aggrieved in Altoona

Dear  Aggie,

Please please please please do not select a mail-by date that is on a weekend or holiday, when you accept a request.  The post office is closed!

Seriously- the PBS system works on calendar days.   We do mean to put some alerts into the system to tell members when they are choosing postal holidays as their mailby dates (and to prevent doing that), but we haven’t been able to get to that item on our (oh-so-long) To Do list yet.   In the meantime, remember that reminder emails won’t go out if the book is marked mailed on time; to prevent getting any of these, the sender needs to keep postal holidays and the like in mind when choosing the mail-by date at the time of accepting a book.  You have a grace period after the mailby date you choose – just be sure that you can actually mail before the deadline, and you will not have any problems with this.
Dear Librarian-  Can foreign-language books be listed under their own section so we can find them easily?   – Polyglot in Peoria

Dear Polly,

We work with a database that is compiled elsewhere, and we are limited to their genres/subgenres.  But there are a lot of ways to find foreign-language books on the site.  And there are a lot of ways to help foreign-language-seeking requestors find the books they are looking for!  For example:

• Genre search:
  • Use the Book Browser to search for Literature and Fiction > World Literature , choosing the geographic area of interest as a sub-subgenre.
• Libres en Espanol:
  • The database does have a genre for Libros en Espanol – this is one of the “popular genres’ in the list on the Browse by Genre area.  To do this search, click Search at the top of the site, then click the Browse By Genre tab on the Search page, and you will see the Popular Genres list.
• Book Tags:
  • Many books in foreign languages have been tagged by members with a corresponding Book Tag.  An easy way to find these tagged books is to tag a book you know is in Russian (for example) with the tag “Russian language”.  Then just click that tag you just created on the book listing to see all of the listings that bear the same tag.  This is an excellent, club-useful implementation of Book Tags.  You can read more about Book Tags in the Help Center.
• Change the title using the Edit Book Data link:
  • If you have a book in a foreign language, help others find the book by adding the language information to the title, in parentheses : “(Lithuanian Language Edition)” after the title will make it very easy for requestors to know that your book is in Lithuanian!  You can use the Edit Book Data link at the bottom of any page on the site to submit these title amendments to our Data Correction Volunteers who will need to review the information before it can be approved and added to the site.
• Keyword search:
  • Put “French language” (for example)  into the search space at the top of the site. Any books that have this phrase in the book description information or in the title will be found using this search.
• Publisher search:
  • If you go to a listing for a book in the language you seek – click the publisher name to see all of the other books from that same publisher.

We hope this helps you Polly!  We wish you des echanges joyeux, los intercambios felices, das glückliche Tauschen, as trocas felizes, de gelukkige uitwisselingen and gli scambi felici!