The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online provides digitized page images of all interviews in the A-Schedule (Personal life histories, 343 interviews) and B-Schedule (Special topics, 362 interviews) as well as manuals and guides from the collection. The images are accompanied by text files for each page. It is possible to search the full text of all interviews, as well as to search the A-Schedule interviews only, the B-Schedule interviews only, or the manuals and guides.
When searching these materials, the user should bear in mind that the original data was not edited for grammatical or typographical errors, and that the re-keyed text is not always accurate due to the poor legibility of some of the original materials. The small number of transcripts in Russian are accessible online, but are not searchable.
Search results will return a list of citations linking to the interview and page containing the occurrence of the keyword/s. In the results list the search term will be highlighted and placed in context, with its surrounding words.
Clicking on the citation link will bring the user to a page of a specific interview delivered through Harvard’s Page Delivery Service (PDS). The user may then browse through the page images of the interview by using the arrow buttons. The user may also browse the text files corresponding to the page images by clicking on the “View Text” button. As the typed interviews were originally reproduced using ditto machines, there is a bluish/purple hue to the print. The text on some pages has almost entirely faded over the years, affecting their legibility. In cases where the text in the image is a faint, the user may prefer to view the re-keyed text. Search terms will not be highlighted when the page image or the text is viewed in the PDS.
When viewing an interview in the PDS, it is possible to search on the text of that particular interview by clicking on the “Search” button.
Access to eighteen of the B-Schedule interviews is restricted to Harvard ID holders because the name of the respondent is given in the interview.