NLS BARD Support: Help us help you

Dear BARD Users,

Those of us at NLSDownload@loc.gov who respond to your email messages have been thinking about ways we can speed up the process of resolving your BARD problems. Here are some things you can do to help us with that:

• If you aren’t writing to us from the same email address you use when logging onto BARD, please let us know the email address associated with your account. That will enable us to go right to your records, rather than having to do some searching and sleuthing to find your account. If you aren’t sure which of a couple addresses it is, you can tell us the ones it might be, and we’ll check them out. If you simply don’t remember, please let us know the first and last name, as well as the postal address, connected with your account, and we’ll try to verify your account that way.
• Please use meaningful subject lines and be as specific as you can in the body of the message. A subject line like “Problem with DB34595” means a lot more than “Help!” or “BARD.” Likewise, if instead of writing something generic like “Problem with the last book I downloaded” as the body of the message, you tell us that you get the “end of book” message before the book has “ended” or that the audio becomes garbled for two minutes in chapter three, 1 hour and 45 minutes into the book, we can get right to the problem. With that information, we can immediately test the book to see if the problem is with the book or if it’s something else.
• Please keep our email conversation intact. In other words, use “Reply” or “Reply All” when responding to a message from us, rather than starting a new message. There are multiple people who respond to queries sent to NLSDownload. Having the conversation intact makes it easy for all of us to get up-to-date on what’s happened so far. We won’t have to go search our archives for previous fragments of the conversation.
• Please don’t attach screen shots. All of us at NLSDownload are blind, so providing a rich, narrative description of the problem will help us to quickly resolve your issue.

Following these guidelines will go a long way toward improving our response time.

Sincerely,