Template:Maryland road logbook/doc

Maryland road logbook is a template that simplifies and better organizes reference calls to the semi-organized spreadsheets that list construction contracts of the Maryland State Roads Commission, the Maryland State Highway Administration, and related agencies from the late 1940s to the early 2000s. These collections will serve as a major resource for articles about portions of the Maryland highway system.

This template is used to create references to the three collections of documents of Series 1859: Construction Contract Log in the Maryland State Archives. Each document contains handwritten spreadsheet entries for varying ranges of years for each county. Each row typically includes the contract number, the state route or routes that are the subject of the contract, the location of the project, the length in mileage of the project, the categories of construction of work for the project, and several dates, including the date the contract was awarded, the date work started, the date work was completed, the date the work was accepted by the state, and the date the work was inventoried by the state. The first document (key = 1) contains entries starting in the late 1940s, and the third document (key = 3) contains entries ending in the early 2000s. The year of the split between the two documents varies: it is as early as 1965 for Kent County and as late as 1984 for Montgomery County. The second document (key = 2) is entirely redundant with the other two documents, so there is no point in using it.

The first document also contains lists of opening dates, signage status as of the early 1960s, highway lane and access of control status as of the early 1960s, and fact sheets about the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and Chesapeake Bay Bridge. However, the template is not yet programmed to handle calls to these resources.

Usage
This template has three required parameters:
 * key: This one-digit number is the number of the document collection on the series webpage. This digit string appears twice in the URL. The template uses this key to generate the URL of the link to the document collection. Use either 1 or 3 in all cases. The default value is 0, which will result in a dead link.
 * contract1: This is the contract number of the project being referenced. The contract number is necessary because it is the only uniquely identifying piece of information on each line of the spreadsheet. If this parameter is not entered in the template call, an error message will appear in the output.

There are several optional parameters:
 * contractX, where X is a value between 2 and 9. Up to nine contracts can be included in each call of the template.
 * dateX, where X is a value between 1 and 9. The value of dateX should be a date on the line of contractX. The date is not required because it is not uniquely identifying; however, it is very helpful so someone reading the reference in an article will know the general timeframe of the construction project and so they can scroll through the chronologically arranged spreadsheet if they wish to view the contents of the project. The recommended date to include is the Date Awarded, which is typically the first date listed on each contract line of the spreadsheet. Although the template does not enforce a particular date format, please use Month Date, Year, such as February 29, 1964.
 * page: This parameter is not printed in the reference in the article, and it does not refer to a particular page in the specific document. Rather, it refers to the page of the PDF of the spreadsheet collection, and this page number is included in the URL the template produces. The inclusion of the page number allows the user to see the specific spreadsheet line when the PDF file of the document collection opens instead of needing to find the page on which the contract is listed. Because the spreadsheet entries are handwritten and there are 30 to 40 entries per page, filling in the dateX parameter will help the user find the specific project. The document may not open to the specified page for all users, depending on their computer application settings.
 * publisher: This parameter should include the name of the agency that awarded the contract. In most cases, the agency will be either the Maryland State Roads Commission (for projects before 1971) or the Maryland State Highway Administration (for projects after 1971). The default value for this field is Maryland State Highway Administration.
 * access-date: The date the document collection was accessed.

Examples
To Come