Note: Single-source report; awaiting corroboration.
CDC Stacks provides a straightforward basic search feature that lets users enter keywords or phrases to retrieve records from all or selected collections on the home page. If no keywords are entered, the system displays the collections page. The basic search covers fields such as title, description, author, genre, subject, DOI, and others.
To narrow results, use quotation marks for multi-word phrases. For example, searching for "bicycles and pedestrians" returns fewer documents than searching without quotes. Quotation marks do not affect single-word searches. Search terms with colons must be enclosed in quotation marks to be processed correctly.
For more detailed queries, CDC Stacks offers an advanced search option from the home page. There are two tabs: Advanced Search and Custom Query. Users can select specific categories and use Boolean operators like AND (require all terms), OR (include any terms), and NOT (exclude terms) for precise filtering.
When entering a multi-word phrase without quotation marks, the system treats it as an AND operation, returning documents containing all the words. For example, entering "public transit" returns records containing both "public" and "transit".