Search fields

Main Page > User manual > Access content > Advanced search > Field names for advanced searching

To search on particular fields, enter in the search box the field name followed by a colon followed by the search term (e.g. exampleField:exampleTerm). Search field names must be entered exactly as shown in order for the search to work.

Field labels are listed as they appear on the pages shipped with ICA-AtoM. If your administrator has customized the field labels in your ICA-AtoM application, these may be different from what appears on your page.

Archival description
The following is a list of the fields in archival description records that can be searched.
 * The Search field is used to limit the scope of search terms, e.g. "levelOfDescription:fonds"
 * The ISAD label and RAD label list the field label as displayed in AtoM
 * Some fields are weighted more heavily (the baseline being 1x) when scoring search results - this has been noted as e.g. "5x weight"

Authority record
The following is a list of the fields in authority records that can be searched.
 * The Search field is used to limit the scope of search terms, e.g. "datesOfExistence:[1970-2000]"
 * The ISAAR field label is presented as it is displayed in AtoM


 * Note: repositories inherit the authority record entity. When indexing repository records, two specific properties are added: holdings (Holdings) and collectionPolicies (Records management and collecting policies).

Accession record
The following is a list of the fields in accessions that can be searched.
 * The Search field is used to limit the scope of search terms, e.g. "title:Peanut"

Searching date ranges

 * startDate:[YYYYMMDD TO YYYYMMDD]
 * This will search for start dates between the two dates listed, inclusive.
 * endDate:{YYYYMMDD TO YYYYMMDD}
 * This will search for end dates between the two dates listed, exclusive.
 * date:[1974 TO 1984]
 * This will search for textual dates (including uncertain dates) between 1974 and 1984, inclusive. Note: because this date data is not structured, the results may be vary due to inconsistencies in formatting.

In ICA-AtoM 1.4  the "date:" selector only searches on the textual "date" field, not the ISO formatted start/end date fields, so:


 * date:[1995-01-01 TO 1997-12-31] - "Range query boundary terms must be non-multiple word terms"
 * The hyphen is messing Zend Search Lucene, this type of date search will NOT work.
 * date:[19950101 TO 19971231]
 * This is searching for string values between 19950101 and 19971231 in the date field only. This query format is best suited to searching the start/end date fields which are formatted as YYYYMMDD in the search index.
 * date: [200-?]
 * This type of searching will be problematic, as the search index cannot determine non-specific dates. If the search needs to be exact, Users are encouraged to search using start date and end date with consistent formatting.