Join Jillian Hiscock, the RHSV Collections Manager, each month in this informative and easy-going Zoom forum on all aspects of cataloguing collections for historical societies. Jillian has a different topic each month and is happy to be guided by those who attend as to what they would like covered in upcoming clinics. Bring your questions (no matter the topic) - this is an interactive space where questions are encouraged. The RHSV does not endorse any particular cataloguing software - we believe it is horses for courses - and Jillian will talk about issues that impact on cataloguing whether you are using cataloguing cards or software.

The forgotten class? Shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Melbourne
Shopkeepers played a vital role in the functioning of nineteenth-century Melbourne society. They owned the businesses where residents obtained goods, from basic daily needs to the flights and fancies of an emerging modern consumer culture. Echoes of their presence live on in the shopfronts and main shopping streets. This lecture investigates and compares the shopkeepers who operated in three distinct, representative suburbs of nineteenth-century Melbourne: genteel Malvern, inner urban North Melbourne and industrial Footscray. In doing so it provides a genuine comparative cross-section of the urban retail trade in this period and reveals the subtle differences between these localities in terms of the prestige and identity ascribed to shopkeepers within the socio-economic fabric of these local societies. Yet across all three towns (or suburbs), shopkeepers held an important and unique role, one that cannot be understood through the same lens as the working class or middle class.