All About BARD

This is a quick basic guide about BARD. What it is and in simple terms how to use it. More detailed information can be found on our website in the downloading tips section.

BARD stands for Braille and Audio Reading Download. This service allows you as an active patron to download your own books and magazines from a website to your computer, and then play them on a flash drive using your digital talking book player. To use BARD, you must be an active patron, have an email account and a high speed internet connection.

To sign up, go to in nlsbard.loc.gov, fill out the online application and wait for approval. Your approval will be sent by email within two days. You will be sent your username which will be the email address you use to sign up and a temporary password. You will change this password the first time you sign in.

To download a book or magazine from BARD, use the link from the library's homepage or go to nlsbard.loc.gov/nc1a and enter your BARD username and password. This will take you to the bard search page. The easiest way to search is to enter the author's name, title of a book or book number, without the DB in front, into the box labeled search the collection.

After you do your search, you will see a results list. Find the title you want to download from the results list. Click or select the link to the title. This will be after the description and labeled in the format download title of Book DB number, a prompt will appear and ask if you want to open file or Save File, select Save File. Depending on your browser this may vary. For example, Internet Explorer will open a window and ask where you want to save the file. In contrast, Firefox won't ask you where to save the file, it will save it to a preset place that can be changed. For more detail on how to do this, see the downloading tips section of our website.

Once you download the book, you need to find where you have saved it so you can unzip the book and play it. To play a book. You will need a digital talking book player and flash drive to put it onto. The books will not play on a computer. The book download is a single zip or compressed file that contains every file that is part of the book. All files must be moved from the zip file to a flash drive to play the book. Once you have located the book's zip file, you can open this file up and copy the files to a folder you create on your flash drive with a memorable name, or you can use an extraction tool like the windows extraction wizard to move the files. In any case, you will want to copy all of the files to a folder that you name that represents the book. For more detail on how to do this, see the downloading tips section of our website. Once the book is unzipped and placed on your flash drive, you can play it on your digital talking book player. To do this, insert the flash drive into your player and turn it on. The player will beep and announce the book. Then it will start to play the book.

Now that you understand better how to use BARD, get an account and start BARDing today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai