There are a variety of different ways in which to search the interviews and data on the people interviewed. To simply browse lists of interviews, interviewees, or interviewers please use the navigation menu to the right.


Full-text search, powered by Google. Powerful, but also very inclusive. Enter search terms below. Clicking on a result will open the link in a new page.



Keywords / themes


This set of keywords are based on the original project themes (read more about them here). This is not intended to be an exhaustive set of keywords, nor are keywords intended to be the only way to search the interviews. Rather these theme-keywords are a quick way to narrow down interviews according to issues that the project was originally interested in. The keywords are thus the original project themes plus a few that suggested themselves in the early stages of the keywording process. We decided not to employ a list that could be endlessly added to allow us to offer a list that covered all interviews equally. If we had not done so, we felt it raised more issues of coverage than it would address. Thus, if a keyword on 'railways' was added after 80% of the interviews had been assigned keywords, how could we - and the user - ensure that none of the previous 80% had discussed railways? In other words, we felt a limited, but complete list was a better tool than an open list with unknown thoroughness. However, we realise all users may not agree, and for this reason, we have added what we term 'alternative keywords'.


'Alternative keywords' are keywords that have been suggested by people working with the interviews. These are not limited to a pre-determined list. This also means there are no claims to completeness. Searching on a altnernative keyword will not show all interviews that deal with a given topic, only those that someone has suggested. The alternative keywords appear on the metadata / summary page below the theme-keywords, but otherwise function the same. They are currently mostly in Enlgish, but Mongolian equivalents will be added in as time and resources allow.



Enter a name to search for, either in English or Mongolian.
This should be a proper name, ie, Dorj or Дорж, not a term (ie, lama).



Enter ID number of person to view. This number always starts with a 990



Enter ID number of transcript to view, leaving off the initial TR, but including the trailing letter, e.g. 080504A
This will first call up a summary first if one is available.


Fuzzier search options


Not all of the data in the project is amenable to searches being generated dynamically. Sometimes it helps to have pre-set categories to look at. For example, if you search on metadata from the search option, you can not currently search for people who are either 'Buddhist' or 'a little Buddhist'. Here are some samples of broader searches that are also possible.


Age by decade of birth
    General religious category
  • Buddhist
  • Shamanist
  • None
  • Other