Help - Finding Foreign Language Books

The Library Catalog does not have an ability to provide a complete listing of our materials in foreign languages. To limit a search by language, use the Library Catalog and perform some sort of search (author, title, keyword, subject, etc.) and then click on the " Modify Search" button at the top of the page. Use the "LANGUAGE" pull down menu to choose a language and then click on "Submit". Problems with our system:

You are limited to only the eight languages offered (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Russian).
This limiting by language will retrieve both materials in the language you specify and materials translated from that language into English, so many of the items you get are still in English.
Requiring you to do an initial search puts severe limitations on the number of items you are dealing with; it is hard to know what is a good initial search term.

Some Alternatives:

1. Using Hedges. The following hedges of search terms for keyword searches in the Library Catalog are as good as any a place to start your search to be limited to a language:

Language	Keyword Search
French	french* or franc*
German	german* or deutsch*
Italian	ital* or rome or roma
Spanish	span* or espan* or mexi* or latin* or hispan*
Japanese	japan* or nippon* or nihon*
Chinese	china or chinese or chinas or taiwan* or beijing
Russian	russ* or soviet* or siberia*

The more terms that you "OR" together, the larger a retrieval you get. Warning: some of these searches take a long time for complete. (Remember to limit to language after the keyword search is done if you are doing these searches manually).

Remember that this is only a way to get a partial listing of our books in these foreign languages.

2. Browsing by LC Classification. You can browse the call number areas for the following national literatures and language studies in the hopes that there will be some books in the appropriate foreign languages:

Country*	LC Class Numbers
Country*	Language Study	Literature
France	PC 2073	PQ 139, PQ 1109
Germany	PF	PT 105
Italy	PC 1111	PQ 4004
Spain	PC 4073	PQ 6004
Mexico	---	PQ 7106
Japan	PL 523	PL 726
China	PL 1071	PL 2253
Russia	PG 2073	PG 2117
Korea	PL 918	PL 894
Viet Nam	PL 4373	PL 4378

The above call numbers are all approximate and all of them are on the fifth floor. This is still not a complete method of finding all the foreign language books. For example, copies of Tom Sawyer translated into Russian will still be shelved in the American Literature section.
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*Apologies to Belgium, Quebec, Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan, most of Latin America, and a few other places I can't think of at the moment....

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