To search our digital archive of Viaduct issues (for which we are grateful to the Digital Maryland project and the Pratt Free Library for digitizing this resource) there are a few alternatives outlined below. For the first few years, we manually went through and found the headlines, authors and short summaries. This was a very slow process. We decided to switch to Artificial Intelligence tools to streamline that process. However, in some cases it may have missed things, and in some cases it may have given information overload. The hope is that there are enough search terms in all the knowledge base articles to lead to the issues that help you find what you need. We used ChatGPT for some and then switched to Notebook LM.
To try to find individual issues of the Viaduct Newspaper that cover a particular topic, you can use the Knowledge Base search field. Select the “Elkridge Heritage Knowledge Base” tab on our website and a search field will appear. For example, type “zip code” in the Knowledge Base search field to find issues that talked about how Elkridge fought for and won the 21075 zip code.
Note: to find articles about the Thomas Viaduct, be sure to search on “Thomas Viaduct” rather than just “viaduct”. All the articles of the Viaduct Newspaper (101 in total) will turn up in your search, but the ones that mention “Thomas Viaduct” together will show up at the top of the list.
If you prefer, you may browse all issues of the Viaduct in our Google Drive, you may go to this link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b22PugprlyTSR258KEKb4Z3K7ntLk9Cv?usp=drive_link
This spreadsheet has mostly the same summaries as in this Knowledge Base but if you are more comfortable searching a spreadsheet, the very first field gives the name of the issue as seen in the Google Drive above. It’s not pretty, but it’s available. We were required to create the spreadsheet for Digital Maryland anyway.
Enjoy searching or browsing the Viaduct!