Template:Maryland road memo/doc

Maryland road memo is a template that simplifies and better organizes reference calls to the semi-organized collections of memoranda of action, meeting minutes excerpts, road transfer agreements, and other short documents and correspondence of the Maryland State Roads Commission, the Maryland State Highway Administration, and related agencies. 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 28 collections of documents of Series 1878: State Roads Commission Meeting Minutes & Memoranda of Action in the Maryland State Archives. Most of the collections contain documents for a particular county from the late 1930s to the late 2000s. However, there are some counties whose related documents are split among two or more collections.

Usage
This template has three required parameters: If any of these parameters are not entered in the template call, an error message specific to the parameter will appear in the output.
 * key: This two-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 and pull the name of the collection.
 * title: This is the title of the specific document being referenced. The title will almost always be at the top of the specific document, such as "Memorandum of Action of State Highway Administrator First-Name Last-Name" or "Excerpt from Minutes of Meeting of the State Roads Commission." The fact that the title is generic is not a problem unless there are two documents with the same title on the same date. In that case, the title should be expanded to differentiate.
 * date: This is the date of the specific document being referenced. Like the title, this information is almost always at the top of the specific document. Although the template does not enforce a particular date format, please use Month Date, Year, such as February 29, 1964.

There are several optional parameters:
 * first, last, and author are used to provide an author's name. Do not use author with either of the other two parameters, but do use author if there are multiple authors. The author should be included if the author, typically the state highway administrator or chairman of the commission, is not included in the title of the specific document.
 * 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 document 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 document when the PDF file of the document collection opens instead of needing to hunt for the document. 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 produced the specific document. In most cases, the agency will be either the Maryland State Roads Commission (for documents before 1971) or the Maryland State Highway Administration (for documents after 1971). The default value for this field is Maryland State Roads Commission.
 * access-date: The date the document collection was accessed.

Examples
To Come