Good evening.

Welcome to the city.

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Good evening and welcome to the City of Rockville Historic District Commission meeting number 02-2025.

Today is Thursday, February 20th, 2025.

I'm HDC Chair Anita Neil Powell, and I am joined by my fellow commissioners, Seph Dimbo, Peter Falseman, Mercy Shingay, and Michael Goldfinger.

We're also joined by city staff.

Sheila Pasier, Preservation Planner, Katie Gerbis, comprehensive planning manager, and Cynthia Walters, Deputy City Attorney.

The historic district commissions are conduct are conducting hybrid meetings.

Applicants and the public may join the meeting virtually via WebEx or in person in the chambers.

The virtual meetings can be viewed on Rockville 11, Channel 11 on County Cable, and live stream at WW.Rockville MD.gov slash Rockville 11.

Each meeting is also available for viewing soon after the meeting is held at WW.

RockfieldMD slash video on demand.

The first item on the agenda is committee and organization report.

Started with a Peerless Rockville.

Is there anyone here from Peerless Rockville staff to give a staff report?

Yes, hi.

Good evening, Commissioner Neil Powell.

And fellow commissioners up there.

I'm Nancy Picard, executive director from Peerless Rockville.

Thank you for having me here this evening.

I often come in and talk a bit about events and things that we've been doing.

And tonight I wanted to kind of share a little bit more instead about another thing that we do, which is our archival collections and documents and the energy and the work that we do in that area and the things that are available to all the residents of the city and the county and really anyone.

At Peerless, we are proud to have a collection of objects, documents, and photographs dedicated to telling Rockville's story.

These collections are used both by people doing academic research and people just wanting to learn more about their community.

Two of our current projects involve increasing the availability and accessibility of these collections.

Utilizing a grant from Montgomery County, we undertook a large digitization project in 2023 and into 2024, involving digitizations of many different items.

Some specifics are things like ledgers, maps, architectural plans, and transparency slides.

Many of these items in particular are either too fragile or too large or in the wrong kind of format for people to view easily.

The project was undertaking to increase this access accessibility and preserve these fragile items.

Among the items are ledgers from businesses in Rockville, which are more than 100 years old.

And it is now possible to access the information contained in these ledgers without damaging the fragile items themselves.

Slides also need special equipment to view, which means many of them have not been seen for decades, not even often by Peerless Rockville staff.

Among the digitization project were 4,441 slides.

So that also will increase the accessibility.

Also coming up very soon will be a virtual exhibit on urban renewal.

And the nucleus of this exhibit is a collection of items received from the city in the early 2000s, containing property appraisals, photographs, architectural plans, and other documents, which give which gives insight into what Rockville was at that time, why the project took place and how people felt about the outcome.

I think people still have feelings about the outcome as we know the town center is ever developing and changing.

This online exhibit called Changing the Map will be available this spring and will also launch with an in-person event inviting people to share them their memories of how the city looked when they were young.

So thank you for sharing and uh follow along on our website for more information.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Any questions?

Yeah, Chairman.

Um Nancy, that's great.

I mean, I'm really excited to hear a lot of that stuff's been digitized.

I'm curious about the ledgers.

Have they been um have they been transcribed?

Are they searchable or is it just images?

Um no, it's not just images.

I believe most of the almost all the ledgers are in PDF forms.

It should be OCR searchable.

We have ledgers um definitely for wire hardware.

I believe we also have one or two medical ledgers that are kind of interesting.

The wire hardware records um just in isolation.

Some of these records don't say a lot, you know.

You kind of look at it and you think, okay, somebody brought, you know, uh whatever they bought, you know, uh hay and you know, sewing supplies or whatever, but it really, if you page through and read and look at it, you get just a just a picture of what life was really like and changes over time.

Um the medical ledgers, some one collection that we have actually the uh doctor worked at the poor farm for some part of time.