Catalog of Government Publications (CGP)

 The ? character or * character (asterisk) are place holders for any number of characters. They can be placed at the left, right or middle of a portion of a word, but it can never be used more than once in a text string. 

The # symbol can be used to find variant spellings in cases where one version of the word has one more character than another version. For example, arch#eology will find both archaeology and archeology. The ! character can be used to find variant spellings in cases where a single character may vary. For example, wom!n will retrieve both woman and women. 

Place parentheses around search elements to specify priority when parsing the command. For example, the search: "History and military or war" may produce very different results to the search "History and (military or war)." 

The -> (hyphen and greater than symbols) can be placed between two words. This indicates that you want to retrieve records that have words from (and including) the first word, through the second word. This search is particularly helpful for limiting a set of records by year of publication. You cannot use to instead of the symbols. For example, use: 1993 -> 1996 or child -> chill. Do NOT use: 1993 to 1996 or child to chill.